


hell of a feeling though

by AGreatPerhaps12



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Brotherly Love, Character Study, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Mostly Canon Compliant, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Protective Diego Hargreeves, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Self-Esteem Issues, Sober Klaus Hargreeves, Substance Abuse, Touch-Starved, apocalypse averted AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-04-06 00:30:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 46,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19051609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AGreatPerhaps12/pseuds/AGreatPerhaps12
Summary: Klaus is never quite sure, until the moment he's getting punched in the face, whether the ghost of Ben following him around is anything more than an extremely vivid hallucination.





	1. Part 1

Klaus Hargreeves has a pretty good idea of how each of his siblings is going to die.

No, that’s not exactly right. He doesn’t know how they'll actually _go out_. Academy life is a bottomless grab-bag of horrors, and Klaus is big enough to admit he's got a better chance of picking winning lotto numbers than he does predicting what will end up killing any given Hargreeves kid. Fighting escaped mutant experiments and watching the Eiffel Tower turn into a literal spaceship humbles you like that.

More like, Klaus already knows how each of his siblings will handle being dead.

Five and Diego are coming back to haunt Dad's ass, for sure. The only reason Klaus knows Five is still alive out there somewhere is because his ghost isn't back here, spitting snarky comments at Dad and heckling the rest of them during drills.

If Luther goes first, he's coming back for Allison, and vice versa. That's a given. Klaus is going to be stuck passing schoolyard notes between planes of existence till the other croaks. It's cool. He's made his peace with it.

Vanya, as always, is a harder read. On the one hand, death would finally give her an out from being the odd one out. On the other, it's basically impossible for Klaus to picture her, alive or dead, anywhere but at Dad's elbow.

Ben is the only one that Klaus is always, absolutely certain will walk straight into that goodnight without so much as an over-the-shoulder. That doesn't stop Klaus from hoping Ben will surprise him by sticking around.

And then Ben dies, and Klaus would rather move into the mausoleum than ever, ever see Ben's face again. Because he wouldn't look like Ben. He'd look like that last, sticky-red image of what was left of Ben. And Klaus has a hard enough time blinking the picture away without it literally haunting him, thank you very much.

 

Klaus would say the house is quieter without Ben around, but that's not technically true. Ben always did most of his talking with his eyebrows, over the pages of a book. It's probably fairer to say that Klaus is quieter without Ben around. Now that Klaus can't barge into Ben's room with no warning whatsoever, take over the foot of his bed, and relay celebrity gossip while Klaus paints his nails and flips through _People_ , and Ben continues to sketch like Klaus was there all along.

Klaus has gotten too many doors slammed in his face to think about trying that shit with anyone else.

Klaus's heartbeat hiccups every time he makes eye contact with Dad, wondering whether Dad will make him try to Conjure Ben. He doesn't. Klaus realizes, with a sour sort of pleasure, that dear old Dad might be afraid to face Ben, too.

Whatever the reason, no Conjuring. Bullet dodged. Dad puts up a statue instead. There's a whole ceremony out in the garden. Dad reads some stock words of remembrance, mostly about the tragic loss of Ben's incredible powers and his bravery in battle and blah, blah, blah.

If Ben were here, Klaus would give him an exaggerated eyebrow waggle while Dad waxes on about "the erection of this statue," and Ben would make his patent tight-lipped smile. The kind he accidentally made whenever Klaus told a dirty joke—grudging, like he was paying up after losing a bet.

But Ben isn't here, and Ben doesn't come back.

 

What do come back are Klaus's regularly scheduled field trips to the mausoleum. Whoopee.

Klaus hasn't been shut in since he was a kid. He remembers those sessions ramping up to almost daily torments when he was nine—in what he now recognizes as Dad's last-ditch attempt to get Klaus's powers ready for prime-time before the Academy went public.

When it became obvious that this whole not-eating and not-sleeping routine was messing with the rest of Klaus's training, Dad finally gave up on him.

_“You’re my greatest disappointment, Number_ _Four.”_

… And the sky was blue. Next?

Honestly, if Klaus had known that his golden ticket out of the crypt was Dad resigning himself to the fact that Klaus was hopeless—well, no. There probably wasn't much Klaus could have done to convince Dad he was a lost cause any faster. Klaus may not have much going for him, but his record for sowing disappointment? Rock solid.

Now he'd finally made it. Being a certified deadweight opened up so many free hours in the day. Klaus was going to get so much more Vitamin D. Failure never tasted so sweet.

Not that Klaus told any of the others, even Ben. It was too pathetic.

As powers go, Klaus always felt like he and Ben pulled the short sticks. Maybe that's why they got along so well: an affinity between people carrying something rotten inside. But at least Ben's power—it was horrifying, sure, no arguments here—but at least it was _useful_.

What did Klaus have? A particularly morbid brand of psychosis that was distracting at best, disturbing at worst, and consistently useless for catching baddies.

Things got better once Klaus could focus on normal—ha, normal—physical training. His idle mind was a sitting duck for nearby spirits, and it was best to have something to focus on. Even if that something was dodging Luther's fists or Diego's knives.

In the field, Klaus made himself useful mostly by being the Ben Whisperer. That is, keeping Ben calm enough that he wouldn't choke before a mission or freak out so thoroughly that interdimensional tentacles made an unexpected appearance.

The gig usually amounted to serving up half-baked jokes mid-combat, or an eye roll whenever Luther and Diego collided because they were both trying to shoulder their way through a door first. And, perhaps most importantly: reassuring Ben that all his victims found everlasting peace as soon as he'd picked them off, and that there were absolutely, positively no restless souls respawning as vengeful ghosts in their vicinity. No sir. No translucent corpses in varying stages of dismemberment to see here. Move along. Klaus will cry about it into his pillow later.

Crying about it later may have been Klaus's one job, but he was very good at it. Dad must've thought so too, because gliding by on Ben's coattails spared Klaus nearly seven years of visits to the mausoleum.

Well, he had a good run.

Klaus's one last, optimistic thought as the door closes behind Dad is that maybe his memories of the mausoleum are warped by little-kid goggles. Maybe now that he's older and Seen Some Shit, it won't be as bad as he remembers.

It's as bad as he remembers.

The outsides of Klaus's hands from pinky to wrist bone are rubbed raw and bleeding from banging on the door by the time Dad returns, however many hours later, to collect him.

"You grew out of that, last time," is all Dad says of Klaus's hands.

So it goes.

A few months in, Dad decides to break up the usual regimen by mixing in visits to fresher spirits. Trips to hospitals, sites of recent accidents, back to the mausoleum. Repeat.

Klaus spends his stretched-out waking hours trying to shake the voices, forget their broken, bloodied, or disease-shrunken bodies. Klaus hangs around so many ghosts that sometimes, he feels like one of them. In the middle of the night, paranoia tries to convince Klaus that he _is_ one of them, somehow astral-projecting himself into a physical body without actually being alive.

Klaus finds himself braced, at the start of every mission, to be sent back where he belongs.

 

Dressing up is among the few things that make Klaus feel like a real, living person.

Ben was the first to notice, of course.

"Do you want to be a girl?" he said one afternoon when they were ten, watching Klaus tape catalogue clippings into a composition notebook like pressed flowers. Clippings mostly plucked from the women's fall line.

Klaus's tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth.

"No," Klaus said, because he didn't. Klaus may not have understood why he wanted to reach for the tube of Allison's sweet-smelling shampoo rather than the industrial-size jug of soap his brothers used. He may not have known why he daydreamed about piercing his ears so he could wear hoops like Mom. But Klaus did know that he didn't want to be a girl.

He at least had that.

Ben considered. "But you like makeup. And dresses."

"Yes," Klaus said, because he'd allowed Ben to see too much of him by now to deny it.

Ben considered this for a significantly longer moment, during which Klaus pretended to lounge casually against the footboard of the bed while holding every muscle in his body tense.

Apparently, Ben found this notion neither crazier nor more disgusting than Klaus's funny little habit of talking to dead people, because he said, "Okay," and went back to his book.

Klaus wanted to hug him. Or cry. Or both. But more than anything, he wanted to move on like nothing was different—and they did. It was that simple.

Trust nothing to be that simple with Luther.

Klaus is admiring his profile in one of Mom's A-line dresses in his bedroom mirror when the alarm sounds. A shock zips up his spine, and Klaus immediately reaches up to tug off Mom's clip-on opals. He drops them to his desk with a clatter and shucks her bracelets off his wrists.

"Let's go, let's go, let's go!"

Luther has recently graduated to stalking the halls and clapping impatiently for the rest of them to get their asses in gear. It's a pretty pointless job, given, you know, the whole alarm setup. Not to mention a thankless one; Luther's definitely had more close encounters with Diego's knives since taking over for Dad. But then, most of Luther's No. 1 duties seem pointless and thankless to Klaus, so what does he know.

Klaus yanks out desk and dresser drawers in search of his mask. Fuck, it was _right here_ —

"Christ on a bicycle!" Klaus clutches at Mom's pearls around his neck and lurches back from the newly appeared ghost on his bed. She regards him indignantly, like _he_ snuck up on _her_.

The worst thing about dead people, besides everything, is how they all show up like Klaus is wearing a big neon _OPEN_ sign. He doesn't know how he can make his No Heartbeat, No Breathing, No Service policy any clearer.

"Nope," Klaus says, turning away to continue his search for the mask. Ghosts are easier to ignore in the afternoon sun, when they're alone and not sporting grotesque injuries. "Not today." Or any other.

The woman is closer now. Ghosts do that, sometimes, when Klaus has his back turned or can only see them in his periphery—move unnaturally quickly. Klaus doesn't know whether they float or teleport Five-style, but it's creepy, and Klaus would rather they not.

Klaus shoves his drawer shut and tries not to recoil from the woman now standing right beside him. "Look—"

"Klaus!" Luther throws open the bedroom door with a bang that makes both Klaus and his uninvited guest flinch. "Let's g—What are you wearing?"

Klaus fights the urge to curl in on himself by straightening up and planting a hand on a popped hip. "It's _who_ am I wearing." Then casts a critical look down at the dress. "Pretty sure this one is from the Reginald Hargreeves 'Women Belong in the Kitchen' collection."

Luther makes a series of incoherent splutters that coalesce in a frustrated, "Take it off. You're holding everyone up."

"Untwist your knickers, Number One," Klaus says, untying the bow around his waist and unzipping the back of Mom's dress to reveal his combat uniform underneath. He smirks at Luther and taps his temple.

Luther rolls his eyes and storms off, which is as much of a concession as he ever makes. When Klaus looks back around, the ghost, too, has gone. He shimmies out of the dress and lays it carefully on his now-empty bed, where he spots his mask. Klaus sticks it on and rushes after Luther, determined to maintain this two-steps-ahead streak by beating him to the front door.

It's not until Klaus is flying down the staircase head-first that he remembers oh, yeah, he borrowed Mom's heels, too.

 

Dad’s furious that Klaus is sidelined for the mission, on account of being in the ER. He doesn't mention the crossdressing. Klaus doesn't know what he expected. From what Klaus gathers through books and TV, parents of queer kids are usually angry because their children haven't grown into the people they were expected to be. Lucky for Klaus, Dad has never really viewed any of his children as _people_ , per se.

 

Klaus wonders, sometimes, what the others think about his trips to the mausoleum. He wonders whether they picture him sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by ghosts like dolls at a child's tea party, gossiping about living and dead relatives. He wonders whether they suspect—whether they have any idea how it really is.

It isn't fair to wish they understood, when Klaus has never been able to make himself explain it to them. But what is this family, if not knee-deep in each other's business at all times without invitation?

They must know, Klaus thinks at his bedroom ceiling fan. Just like Klaus knows about Diego's supposedly secret speech therapy lessons with Mom. Just like they're all politely ignoring the accelerating undercurrent between Allison and Luther.

Klaus's siblings have had years of practice tuning him out. But the way Klaus screams when he's locked up, even with a broken jaw wired shut, it seems like the whole world must be able to hear him.

If the others do know, though.

This is where Klaus has to break eye contact with the ceiling fan and curl up in a ball with his head under his pillow. If they do know, if they even suspect, and they've never said—

The thing is, would Klaus put it past them?

Luther thinks the sun shines out of Dad's ass. Allison thinks the sun shines out of Luther's ass. Diego's too busy with his perpetual pissing contest with Luther to bother with problems that can't be solved with knives.

If anyone knows, Vanya does, and she's always wanted superpower lessons so badly that she probably thinks Klaus should be thanking Dad on bended knee for such wonderful educational opportunities.

Ah, fuck. That's not fair. This is Vanya, he's talking about. Vanya, who once burst into tears when she caught Klaus and Ben burning ants with a magnifying glass in the garden. Vanya would never intentionally let Klaus get hurt. None of them would, Klaus thinks. Which means, none of them know.

It's both easier and more difficult to cross the threshold of the mausoleum, knowing not to expect any cavalry to come.

Ha. Look at Klaus, silently daydreaming about his bunch of sixteen-year-old siblings coming to rescue him for himself.

Number Four, superhero extraordinaire.

 

Getting drunk for the first time is like sinking into a hot tub after wriggling out of a cold pool.

Klaus convinced Allison to Rumor the local liquor store clerk into believing they're twenty-one, so they could buy something to ring in their seventeenth. Dad, as usual, is celebrating with an elaborate evening of nothing at all. Very on-brand for the Hargreeves, to commemorate deathdays with statues and birthdays with early bedtimes to rest up for a six a.m. 10k. Ben is laughing at them, somewhere.

Once Dad is asleep and Mom is plugged in, Allison leads the way up to the rooftop greenhouse, where their flashlights reveal remnants of an old blanket fort.

"Ooh-la-la," Klaus says, settling himself on a tasseled pillow under the bed sheet canopy.

“Move over,” Diego says, sprawling next to him, knocking Klaus with his knee.

Klaus smacks him in the arm with a pillow, which Diego snatches and hugs to his chest. Klaus retaliates by pillowing his head on Diego's shoulder and refusing to be shaken off.

After mausoleum days, Klaus is short on warmth. He's not above stealing it from others, when they'll let him. Diego must be in a good mood, because he gives up easily.

"I didn't know this was still up," Luther says, quiet enough that it's clearly meant only for Allison.

"Of course it is," Allison says, shaking out her bedspread like a beach towel in front of Diego and Klaus, so that she, Luther, and Vanya can sit across from them.

"I like what you've done with the place," Klaus says, twirling the cord of a fairy light between his fingers. "Very boho-chic."

Luther makes a face like Klaus is speaking German, but Allison smiles. "Thank you," she says, and wraps a hand towel around the cork of their first bottle of champagne. It's nothing like how people open champagne in movies. Dad is a light sleeper, so Allison has to wiggle the cork out as slowly as possible, and they all wince at the soft pop it expels upon release.

Allison pours one out for each of them in the seven mugs Luther carried up from the kitchen. Klaus claims his and Ben's. After a brief game of eye-contact chicken to decide who's going to tag in for Five, Vanya collects his mug.

Luther raises his cup to make a toast, but then frowns, like he doesn't know how to say a few words that aren't a rallying cry before battle.

"To seventeen," Klaus says, holding his and Ben's drinks aloft. "Miracle any of us made it this far."

 

Drunkenness comes up to meet Klaus quicker than expected.

A few glasses in, Klaus's head is too heavy for his neck, and turning too quickly sends the room careening in the opposite direction. But it's _good_. No ghosts in sight. Not even the memories of past encounters that usually dark-tint the periphery of Klaus's mind. Just Vanya, Allison, Luther, and Diego. All completely opaque, with all their body parts in the right place.

Klaus is reminded of sneaking out to Griddy's Doughnuts late at night when they were kids. How many years has it been since they did that? Klaus can't remember the last time they were all together besides silent mealtimes, which don't count. It's nice.

He must say as much aloud, because Vanya says, "Well, almost all together," and knocks back the last of Five's drink.

"Where do you think he is right now?" Allison says, leaning back on her hands and tipping her chin toward the ceiling, like Five might suddenly fall out of thin air. At this point, Klaus wouldn't even be surprised. His life is a comic book, and Five always was dramatic like that.

"Hanging out at an intergalactic dive bar, lecturing aliens on proper time-hopping technique," Klaus guesses.

"Crazy fucker," Diego says fondly.

"Remember when he was still learning spatial jumps, and he kept ending up in the wrong place?" Luther says.

"Under the kitchen sink," Allison says.

"In the chimney," Vanya adds.

"At least never showed up in the shower with you." Luther shudders at the memory.

"At least he never ripped the bathroom door off its hinges," Diego says pointedly.

"Still not as embarrassing as that time you boomeranged yourself in the nuts with a baseball," Luther shoots back.

Klaus grins lazily. They don't do this much anymore—banter without real heat. That's nice too. Everything is so nice. Bless the universe for the ghost-canceling headphones of alcohol, Klaus thinks, and pours himself another drink.

"Okay, that's enough for you," Diego says sometime later, both too soon and not soon enough. Diego uncurls Klaus's fingers from the handle of his mug and sets it down somewhere out of sight.

Klaus makes a low whining noise in the back of his throat, but makes no moves to stop Diego. He's having some trouble communicating the idea of motion to his limbs.

"Up you get," Diego says, looking down at him. Huh. When did Diego stand up?

"No thank you," Klaus says. At least, he's fairly certain the words come out in that order.

"No—nope nope nope," Diego says, lunging forward to grab Klaus's wrists to stop him flopping back onto the pillows.

"So comfy," Klaus pouts.

"Sure, until Dad finds you up here tomorrow and kills you," Diego says, which is when Klaus realizes that the others have already gone downstairs. "Come on."

"Okie dokie." Klaus waits for his body to pick itself up. It doesn't. _Brain to appendages, come in, appendages_. Nothing.

"Such a lightweight," Diego says, even though he's slurring his words, and stoops down to pick Klaus up bridal style.

Klaus loops his arms around Diego's neck. "My hero."

Diego frowns, jostling Klaus in a way that Klaus really thinks is playing with fire, given how much champagne is sloshing around in his belly. "Dude, you actually weigh, like, nothing."

"Yes, yes, you're very strong," Klaus says, patting Diego indulgently on the shoulder.

"That's not what I—never mind," Diego says grumpily.

Klaus hums 'Sixteen Going on Seventeen' quietly as Diego carries him, step by staggered step, to his bedroom.

"Hey, Diego?" Klaus says, as Diego kicks Klaus's door open and crosses his dark room to drop Klaus—more gently than expected—onto his bed.

"Hmm?" Diego says, midway through turning away.

"D'you wish we could do this all the time?"

Klaus has more words in his head to follow that question. Words like, _Do you ever wish we were just normal teenagers, rather than a bunch of superkids who have to play-pretend normalcy in the middle of the night? Even if it meant no badass powers, no post-mission adrenaline highs, no teen magazine covers, am I the only one who thinks that would be pretty nice?_

Klaus should unspool this thought further, is trying to figure out how, when Diego says, "What, me carrying you around the house like a princess?"

Klaus closes his mouth. Then closes his eyes. The task of explaining himself suddenly seems too exhausting to attempt. "Sure."

"Don't get used to it," Diego says, before completing his pivot away from Klaus and closing the door behind him.

 

Klaus wakes up to the morning sun shining daggers into his eyes and feeling like a fish swollen full of toxic runoff. But for once, Klaus hasn't dreamed of the mausoleum, and that's worth all the hangover in the world.

 

It's not so much a new routine, as it is a new way of life, getting wasted every night after training. It's a gasping inhale after hours underwater. Top of the line respite. Ten out of ten, would recommend.

Klaus isn't stupid. He knows, logically, that this is a terrible, no good, very bad idea. Fortunately, Klaus is already the undisputed Academy fuck-up. Why not lean into it?

Dad might know. If he keeps regular tabs on their savings accounts, he definitely suspects. But Klaus has gotten drinking-to-just-before-the-brink-of-an-epic-hangover down to an art. And if it's not affecting training, it's not Dad's problem.

Unfortunately, crime is a fickle mistress, and missions don't follow Dad's militant schedule the way training does. So it's inevitable that Klaus go on the occasional mission slightly buzzed. This, Klaus does not recommend quite so strongly. Although, the return trip home is significantly quieter when he's not being trailed by rookie ghosts howling at him about how he'll pay, how they'll all pay. _Yeah, yeah, take a number_ , Klaus thinks.

Possibly, it says something about how truly useless Klaus is that Numbers One through Three don't even seem to notice the difference. Oh, Klaus zoned out and got himself captured again? Surprise surprise. Klaus tripped and knocked Diego over right as he was about to take deadly aim at the villain of the week? Go figure.

Klaus isn't really in the market for new reasons to hate himself, but here they are, showing up anyway. At least now he has a means of unhooking his brain from his body and letting it drift up, up, up to bob around somewhere above the rest of him, out of the way for a while.

When he's not being sent on ill-timed missions, drunk-Klaus keeps to himself. Hargreeves kids have spent enough time shunted together to respect a closed door when they see one—with the possible exception of Luther, although he's given Klaus a wider berth since the broken jaw incident.

Klaus isn't a huge fan of closed, let alone locked doors, for obvious reasons. He even keeps the door cracked when he's bathing. But for drinking, Klaus will close his door (and open his window, no matter the weather, just to scratch the itch that he needs an escape route at all times).

Mausoleum days have always made Klaus clingy. The need to touch people who won't pass through him, talk to people who aren't screaming at him to avenge their deaths or pleading with him to pass messages to left-behind lovers—it aches like hunger.

But Klaus is a person best handled in small doses. Or, so he's been told. He knows better, by now, how to put himself away for the day. So with the possible exception of Dad, grandmaster of turning a blind eye, Klaus is pretty sure no one has noticed.

Drinking is like the mausoleum, like that. Ninety-nine percent of Klaus cringes away from the idea of Allison or Vanya, and especially Luther or Diego, discovering Klaus’s most profound fuck-up. But there's that one, traitorous percent that wishes someone would please, for once, care enough to find out.

No one does. Klaus is ninety-nine percent relieved, one percent crushed, and zero percent surprised. No one's ever seemed particularly bothered by his misery; no reason Klaus's newfound relief should be any different.

 

There's a slight possibility that Diego might, perhaps, maybe know something.

This educated guess brought to you by the fact that Diego just jimmied his way through the lock on Klaus's bedroom door to find Klaus tilted back in his desk chair with a bottle of vodka tucked against his chest.

Klaus blinks up at him in surprise. "No, please, come in," he says, gesturing so expansively with his free arm that he nearly loses his balance.

Diego does, kicking the door shut behind him and closing his fist around the front of Klaus's shirt to yank him forward. "Hey!" The front legs of Klaus’s chair hit the hardwood floor with a sharp clap. "What the hell?"

"Shut up." Diego jabs the pause button on Klaus's boombox to silence Cyndi Lauper's crooning about how girls just wanna have fun. "You're drunk. Again."

Klaus's common sense, currently riding in the backseat of his brain, makes the feeble note that Diego's expression means Very Serious Business.

The inebriation sitting at Klaus's front wheel makes the compelling counterpoint that no one can expect to be taken seriously while wearing flannel pajamas.

"I am indeed," Klaus says. "Gold star for you, Number Two." He reaches up to boop Diego on the nose.

Diego smacks his hand away. "Stop it. What the hell is wrong with you?"

Klaus considers. _Besides_ having spent his afternoon ignoring a persistent, not to mention decapitated corpse that couldn't take a hint? "Nothing," Klaus says. "Until you arrived. Unannounced." Klaus angles the neck of his bottle in Diego's direction.

"Give me that," Diego snaps, grabbing the bottle and, for lack of a better place to put it, setting it on Klaus's desk.

Klaus pushes out his lips thoughtfully. He could reach for it, but he probably won't. At least not until Diego releases the front of his shirt. If he keeps yanking it around, he's going to stretch it out. More than he already has.

"You gotta shape up, man," Diego says.

Klaus grins. "You sound like Dad."

Diego's eye twitches, but he doesn't take the bait. Instead, he says, "You reek."

" _Hooooow_ rude of me," Klaus says, craning his neck and drawing the word into a long exhale that makes Diego lurch back and finally release Klaus's shirt. Klaus smooths it down with clumsy hands.

"God, you are so—"

Through Klaus's swimmy vision, Diego's scowl fills in the blank.

It prickles. Klaus wishes Diego would go away. He's sort of ruining Klaus's everything-is-beautiful-and-nothing-hurts time.

"Well, when you put it like that," Klaus says, giving his smile an amused edge. This is a low blow, taunting Diego of all people for being inarticulate. Low enough that it might make Diego leave.

No such luck. "So, what, then?" Diego crosses his arms. "Couple drinks on our birthday and suddenly you're an alcoholic?"

"Diego. Buddy. Pal." Klaus stands on wobbly legs and grips Diego's upper arms. "It's just a few drinks."

"Tonight and every other night."

Credit where credit is due. Diego's more astute than he looks. Also, apparently good at picking locks. Klaus would make a mental note to ask Diego how to do that, but experience says drunk self-notes are as good as written in sand before high tide. No time like the present. "Can you teach me how to pick a lock?" he says.

"What? No. Stop changing the subject." Diego uncrosses his arms and puts his hands on Klaus's shoulders to sit him back down in the desk chair.

Klaus has spent a lot of time watching his siblings pretend, whether they're pretending to be a modern von Trapp family or a teen Justice League. Still, it's weird, in this moment, to watch Diego pretend to be a grown-up. Klaus has seen Diego play Irritated Older Brother #2 more times than he can count, but Stern Father isn't a face he's put on before.

Diego must find it uncomfortable, too, because his expression softens marginally when he says, "I'm worried about you."

_Don't cry. Don't cry._ "There's nothing to worry about."

"Bullshit."

Klaus looks away and swallows thickly.

Diego crouches in front of him. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong," he says, like something straight out of an after-school special. Which it probably is. Growing up with no role models besides a world-famous crackpot, a fifties housewife robot, and a superintelligent chimpanzee, Klaus isn't the only one who's learned most of what he knows about being a real person from TV.

If there were ever a moment to tell, this is it. Diego's asking. Someone's actually asking.

Klaus opens his mouth, but the words don't come. Diego is looking up at him with those stupidly big brown eyes. He's not playing grown-up anymore, and Klaus has never been more acutely aware that Diego's only seventeen, too. The way Diego carries himself and cuts down enemies, it's easy to forget.

But combat is garden-variety terrifying. The things Klaus sees—fuck, he needs another drink. Klaus sits on his hands. The things Klaus sees on the daily make combat look quaint. The mere thought of recapping seven seasons of _Klaus Visits the Mausoleum_ to Diego makes Klaus want to cry again.

Besides, what would be the point? It's not Diego's fault that Klaus's supposed superpower regularly makes him want to brain himself on the nearest sharp corner. Diego can't do anything to help. Klaus would just be letting his own misery spill over onto Diego, and Diego probably has plenty of misery of his own to be getting on with.

"Klaus?" Diego presses.

Klaus sighs, packs his grand confession plans into a box, and tucks them away in a back corner of the basement of his mind. Maybe next time.

"Why does there have to be something wrong with me?" he says. "What, like our whole lives aren't reason enough to drink?"

Diego's expression hardens. "So, you're just going to slowly poison yourself."

Like any of them can think about living long enough for cirrhosis of the liver to matter. (Yeah, that's right. Klaus has done his research. He knows exactly what the fuck he's getting into.) "Worse ways to go," Klaus says.

Diego stares at Klaus for three solid seconds, scoffs, and stands up. "Such a fucking waste."

Klaus's eyebrows lift. "Excuse me?"

"With the company you keep, you should know better than anyone how short life is," Diego says, like he has any idea about anything.

The pleasantness of intoxication is fading fast, and the world is coming into painfully sharp focus around Klaus. "Shut up."

"Ben's death? Could have been any of us," Diego says, like Klaus hasn't spoken. "But you got to walk away. This is what you're gonna do with it?"

"I said. shut. up." Klaus stands, fists at his sides. Even tipsy, Klaus isn't dumb enough to pull anything, but dammit if he doesn't wish he were Luther right now.

"Ben would back me up on this," Diego says.

_Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't cry_. "Get out," Klaus says. "Get out _now_."

Diego doesn't budge. "You know he would. Why don't you call him up and ask? Unless he's already here, telling you you're just as much of a dumbass as—"

"Get out!" Klaus shoves Diego forcefully enough that he stumbles into the door and winces at the doorknob digging into his back.

Klaus has never shouted at any of them before. He hates that Diego made him shout.

Diego gapes at Klaus for a beat before fixing his face into something more commanding. "Klaus—"

"I said," Klaus says, quiet now. "Go."

Diego goes.

Klaus re-locks his door and turns to his closet. He pulls out the fluffy pink robe he borrowed from Allison a while back and wraps it around himself. He wipes his eyes with the soft sleeves, collects his vodka from the desk, and curls up in the corner of his bed.

Fuck Diego. He doesn't know anything. And fuck him especially for bringing up Ben.

 

Klaus drinks himself to the point of feeling a little more forgiving.

Diego _doesn't_ know anything, but Klaus could have told him. If Klaus weren't such a coward.

If Klaus weren't such a coward, a lot of things would be different.

Klaus resolves, as the alcohol coaxes him toward sleep, that next time he won't chicken out. Next time Diego asks, Klaus will tell him whatever he wants to know.

 

There is no next time.

Diego is the first to move out for good, less than two months later, without telling anyone where he's going.

Vanya leaves next, to start her music program in New York. This is a good thing, Klaus tells himself. Even if he will miss occasionally turning down his own music to drift on the river of whatever classical piece Vanya happens to be practicing.

Allison's departure comes as a bigger surprise. Not because she belongs in L.A. any less than Vanya does in New York, but because Klaus never thought he'd see the day she left Luther.

And then Klaus is left alone with Luther. Which basically means alone.

Luther doesn't bang on Klaus's door when the mission alarm blares anymore. Without Allison to spread a Rumor that Klaus is invisible to perps, or one of Diego's knives to have Klaus's back while the rest of them kick ass, Klaus is too much of a liability. Dad fills this new free time in Klaus's schedule with more trips to the hospital.

Sleep is scarcer than ever, and comes in one- to two-hour snatches throughout the night. Klaus can't seem to drink enough or sleep enough or smack his forehead with the balls of his hands enough to fully mute the undead vying for his attention. So he drinks, sleeps, and smacks himself into oblivion as much as possible.

Klaus has a whole new system to remind himself that he's alive. One that involves bubble baths and candles and Cher. As soon as Dad frees him from a stint in the mausoleum, Klaus makes a beeline for the bathroom and sheds his dirty clothes. He stands over the tub, picking at his skin, until the water is warm and deep enough to hide in. It’s quite nice.

Luther would beg to differ. Tonight, he pauses outside the bathroom door to look in on Klaus, who's just finally drunk and bathed himself into a mental fog thick enough to obscure the house fire victims who followed him home. Klaus would say Luther is lurking, but Luther is really too big to lurk. Looming, is more like it.

When he doesn't disappear from Klaus's peripheral vision after a few seconds, Klaus turns to look at him. Luther's got blood on his temple and bruises on the skin exposed by his rolled up sleeves. He must have been dispatched while Klaus was locked up.

"So, this is what retirement looks like," Luther says.

The jab hurts, but Klaus's brain is currently wrapped in enough insulation that it doesn't puncture him. He tips his head back against the lip of the tub and gestures at the closed toilet seat. "Care to join?"

Luther looks like he could really use at least a few minutes surrounded by soothing aromas, and maybe a foot soak. Klaus could really use some living company, even if it's Luther's.

The feeling is not mutual. Luther scowls and stomps off to his room. Klaus's stomach sinks. "Rain check," he says to no one, and reaches a dripping hand over the side of the tub to take another swig, hot and prickly, straight from the neck, to buoy himself up.

Klaus turns up the volume on the radio perched on the windowsill above the bath and pulls his arms back into his warm water cocoon. Klaus hugs his torso and shivers, and stares up at the bottom of the radio jutting over the edge of the windowsill, daring it to fall in.

 

_Klaus... Klaus... Help me Klaus... Why, Klaus..._

Klaus's moan is a long, strung-out vibration in his chest that he can't actually hear because his hands are clapped so tight over his ears. He's curled up in a corner, eyes scrunched shut—itchy from dried-up crying. He's so tired, his head pounds, his back aches. He wants to go home. Please, please let him go home soon.

_Klaus... Klaus, please..._

There's a kid in here today, about Klaus's age. What's left of a kid, anyway, thrown from a vehicle into a tree. There's not a lot that makes Klaus vomit, anymore, but he had to switch corners to avoid his own puddle of sick. He can't open his eyes again.

How long has he been here? Time is putty in the dark of the mausoleum, but Klaus doesn't think he's ever been in here this long. He's vibrating like a plucked string. Please, please...

_Klaus... Klaus!_

"Shh," Klaus murmurs miserably, more to remind himself that he has lips and a tongue that he can move. That he isn't a disembodied pinprick, sunk deep down in a dark abyss and completely adrift. He's real. He's alive. He's going to get out. He's real. He's alive. He's going to get out. He's—

_Klaus... please..._

Oh, god, please let him get out. Please, please, _someone_.

But there's no one left. Only Luther and Dad. And one day, when Dad accepts that Klaus truly isn't good for anything, maybe he'll just leave Klaus here. Maybe—maybe that's what's happening right now. Maybe Dad isn't coming back. Maybe Klaus is going to be stuck here, surrounded, until—until—

"Klaus. Look at me."

It isn’t like the other voices. It's not harsh or demanding. It's calm, commanding, and startling enough to make Klaus's eyes snap open.

It's Ben.

Or, it's how Klaus imagines Ben would look if he were here.

It isn't the ghost of Ben. Klaus knows ghosts. Ghosts arrive looking exactly as they died. This Ben, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Klaus, is slightly older than Klaus last saw him, and most importantly _whole_. He isn't real, but dammit if it isn't good to see him anyway.

"Ben?" is what Klaus would say, if he had any air in his lungs.

"Klaus. Breathe," the apparition of Ben says.

Right, breathing. That.

"In." Ben models a deep inhale. "Out." Exhale. "In. Out."

Klaus sucks in a thin breath. The air comes slowly, like he's pulling it through a coffee straw. He pushes it back out. In again, to mirror Ben's exaggerated inhale, and out.

Only Klaus could do such a shitty job of keeping himself alive that he needs a ghost to coach him through it. Hallucination of a ghost. Whatever.

"That's good," Ben says. "In, out."

Klaus's tunnel vision is receding, enough for him to remember they've got an audience.

"Hey, hey." Ben snaps his fingers in front of Klaus's eyes to stop them drifting over to the dead teenager among the crowd. "Eyes on me."

Klaus reaches out on instinct with a hand that passes straight through Ben's chest. An awful, ragged whimper of a noise escapes him.

Ben's expression is pinched. "It's okay. You're okay."

He's not. He's _not_. "I wish you were here."

"I am," Ben says. He scoots himself closer. "I'm right here."

Such a comforting idea that Klaus almost believes him.

Klaus wants to close his eyes, but doesn't want to lose track of Ben. He swallows a sob.

"It's okay," Ben repeats. "You've got this. It isn't forever."

It might be, this time. "Dad isn't—he's not—"

"Klaus. How many times have you been here?"

"Like. Hundreds." Fuck, Klaus is crying again. He pulls up his collar to wipe his eyes.

When Klaus emerges from his shirt, Ben's expression is steely. "And how many times has Dad left you?"

"None."

"There you go," Ben says, looking strangely relieved by it. "He's coming back. You're getting out of here."

"Until next time." The tears are coming faster now, blurring Ben. "Dad always puts me back."

Klaus wipes his eyes with his sleeve frantically to bring his brother back into focus. The sight of Ben's expression is almost surprising enough to make Klaus stop crying. For the first time ever, Ben Hargreeves looks ready for a fight.

But when he speaks, Ben is as steady as always. "Then you have to leave."

It's exactly what Klaus would want Ben to say, if he were here, but— "I can't."

"You're eighteen."

That's not what Klaus meant.

Don't get him wrong. Klaus has fantasized about leaving. A lot. But he doesn't have Vanya's full-ride B.F.A. program waiting for him, or Allison's ability to Rumor her way into free everything, or Diego's post-apocalyptic survival skills.

More than that, if Klaus left the Academy, then that would mean that leaving, on some level, was an option all along, and that maybe they could have left before Ben—

"Klaus. It's time."

Ben's unwavering calm is painfully familiar. Klaus was always everything in excess; flamboyant but secluded, a downhearted chatterbox. Ben straddled every spectrum, considered every angle, weighed options ad nauseam. When he wasn't unleashing wild eldritch creatures from his chest, Ben was the most contained person Klaus had ever met.

You could always trust Ben.

Klaus tips his head forward to rest his temple on his knee and side-eye his hallucination. "Will you come with me?"

"That is how this works."

Klaus knows. He just needed to hear it. He nods, shifts so that his knee is digging into his left ear, and covers his right with his hand. The rest are getting loud again. Ben mimes a deep inhale and exhale. Klaus breathes in, breathes out. He's got this.

 

When Klaus wakes up from what turns out to be a two-day bender, he's no longer hallucinating his dead brother.

This, by all accounts, should be good news. Klaus doesn't have much in the way of normalcy, and not being insane—at least in the traditional sense of the word—was one of the few things Klaus could hang his hat on. Klaus should be relieved that one itty bitty mental breakdown doesn't mean his brain is permanently busted in a new way.

Klaus doesn't feel relieved. He feels like shit.

Regardless. If Klaus was waiting for a sign to leave the Academy, then a vision of Ben telling him to get the fuck out of dodge is basically a cosmic billboard. Imaginary Ben was right. It's time.

Klaus almost feels a little nostalgic as he drags himself through the mansion in pursuit of something to numb his skull-cracking headache. That is, until he arrives in the kitchen to find Luther eating a bowl of Wheaties like the walking cliché he is.

"Nice of you to finally join the land of the living," Luther says.

Klaus throws him a wan smile and a wink. "Don't get used to it, love. I'm on a very short visa."

"All the poison you put in your body? I don't doubt it."

Klaus hates it when Luther says pretentious stuff like that. _I don't doubt it_. The words sound wrong coming from Luther's quarterback body, like he’s a ventriloquist dummy that Dad is controlling from someplace out of sight.

Klaus gives Luther a cheery middle finger and opens the cabinet. He pulls the bottle of painkillers from the top shelf, shakes two, then four, then six into his hand and swallows them dry.

When he looks up, Luther has put his spoon down and is frowning Klaus like he's a piece of gum on the bottom of a shoe. "You really do look terrible," he says at length.

Klaus bats a bashful hand. "Oh, stop."

"I'm serious."

"I know." Luther always is.

Klaus pockets the pill bottle and pushes himself off the counter.

"Where are you going?" Luther says. As though he and Klaus have spent more than a hello and goodbye's worth of time alone in a room together in years.

"Dunno," Klaus says, heading upstairs to pack. Anywhere but here.

 

The next time Klaus hallucinates Ben, he's in the middle of screaming his throat sore. Screaming Ben's name, as it happens.

Klaus used to be able to opt out of nightmares, if he drank himself into a sufficient stupor before falling asleep. Simpler times.

As it is, here's Klaus, frantic and damp with sweat, wailing into his pillow.

Above the din: "Klaus. _Klaus_."

At first, Klaus thinks it must be one of his housemates. That would be a surprise. Klaus has the basement bedroom for a reason.

An even bigger surprise is blinking through the gloom to see Ben sitting on the edge of his mattress in the region of Klaus's knees. Klaus's shrieking trails off.

"You awake?" Ben says.

Klaus nods and sniffs. Is he crying again? Yes, yes he is. He cups his forehead in the palm of one hand and fumbles blindly on his nightstand with the other. His fingers find the familiar contours of his pipe and his lighter. He flicks the flame over the bowl he didn't finish smoking before falling asleep and inhales deep.

"You sure that's a good idea?"

Klaus nods. Anything to relax the whiplash of seeing a living, breathing—well, sitting, blinking—Ben on his bed, moments after dreaming a rerun of Ben’s death. Klaus holds his inhale for one, two, three before coughing an exhale into his forearm. He's still newish to this.

"Thought that was a one-off," Klaus says, once his throat is clear.

Ben frowns. "What?"

"This." Klaus waves a finger between his chest and Ben's, and sips another inhale of sour smoke. He pulls the pillow from behind his back and hugs it to his chest. Exhales more smoothly this time. "You."

"You're a difficult person to reach," Ben says.

"By design, baby," Klaus says, and raises his pipe like _cheers_ but waits to take another drag. If the deal is that hallucination-Ben is supposed to be a ghost, then getting too high too fast might make Ben pull a vanishing act, like all the others do. Klaus isn't ready to let him go yet.

"This is how you deal with ghosts now?" Ben is profoundly unimpressed.

Thanks to Klaus's generous pothead roommates, yes. Smoking weed is a whole different flavor of inebriation than drinking. And Klaus may still be in the honeymoon phase of this new vice, but from where he's standing, it's all positives. Not having to pee constantly? Yes, please. TV is way more interesting? Totally. No waking up absolutely flattened by a hangover? Thank god.

Who now averages four hours of sleep at night and is absolutely killing it at adulthood? This guy.

"Cheaper than therapy," Klaus says, digging a knuckle into one of his tear-itchy eyes.

Ben's expression somehow becomes _more_ deadpan. "How long?"

"Oh, come on," Klaus says. Fuck whatever part of his subconscious is trying to make him say it out loud. "You know."

"We can't read your mind," Ben says, with a furrowed brow that says he can't believe he has to give Klaus this lesson in Ghosts 101.

Klaus grins. The cannabis is kicking in, filing down the sharp corners of his feelings. Or maybe that's just his imagination getting ahead of his high. "Right, yes," Klaus says, making a cyclic gesture with his hand, "because you're a ghost. Wink wink."

Ben's frown deepens. He looks borderline suspicious, the way he used to when he didn't understand something, like he thought the universe must be playing a trick on him. "What?"

Klaus holds up a _one moment please_ finger while he takes a hit. "A few director's notes," he says, addressing whatever part of his cerebellum is in charge of this one-man show. "Number one. _Consistency_. If you're going to follow one of the rules, you have to follow all of them. Otherwise it ruins our suspension of disbelief."

"What."

"I mean, what is this?" Klaus indicates the leather jacket that Ben absolutely never owned in life, and most certainly wasn't wearing when he died. "Sloppy costume work," Klaus answers for Ben, whose face is doing a very good impression of Luther spotting Klaus in a dress. "If I'm really supposed to believe that I'm having a two a.m. chat with Ben Hargreeves' ghost, he should be dressed in Academy uniform. Also, be covered in blood. And also be sixteen. All things considered, a little spandex doesn’t seem like too much to ask."

Ben seems to need a moment to take all this in. Klaus will wait.

"You don't think I'm actually here," Ben finally concludes. He looks sorry enough that Klaus feels sorry for him.

"It's not your fault. It's my fault for not convincing me," Klaus says, reaching automatically forward to pat Ben's hand.

He knows it isn't there. He _knows_. So it shouldn't spark a bright pain deep in Klaus's chest when his fingers pass through thin air. And yet.

Klaus tucks the hand back into his lap.

Ben looks legitimately upset now. Does Klaus's imagination have a customer service number? Because Klaus is very much dissatisfied with his experience.

"For instance," Klaus says, and takes another drag. He's ready to recede into himself and be alone, now, please. "If you were Ben, you'd need a pretty good backstory for why you decided to randomly show back up after two years. Resting in peace not your cup of tea?"

Klaus doesn't mean to live-splain death to a dead person, but again, Klaus is something of an unwilling expert on the subject. Ghosts either linger with unfinished business or they Move On. It doesn't happen both ways.

"I came back for you," Ben says.

Klaus inhales way too much smoke and descends into an epic hacking fit. His subconscious can't just say stuff like that, what the fuck.

"What?" he wheezes, staring at Ben with eyes watery from all the coughing. No other reason. Absolutely not.

"I came back for you," Ben repeats, with just the same weight behind every word.

Klaus gapes at Ben. He feels cracked open, like if he makes any sudden moves he's going to spill out all over the place.

"No one comes back for me." Klaus doesn't mean to whisper, but.

"I did."

Really, Klaus thinks, it's the kindest figment of imagination his brain could have gifted him.

 

Ben-but-not-really keeps showing up.

Sometimes he even has a book with him, or some other prop from his time on Earth. "Ghosts don't carry books," Klaus tells him one day, just to see whether his brain takes constructive criticism.

Ben puts a finger to his lips and makes a _shoo shoo_ gesture. Klaus doesn't bother about it after that. Fuck it, let the nonexistent boy read his nonexistent book.

Honestly, Klaus savors the company when he's sober enough to see straight. True to his word, Ben goes wherever Klaus goes, following him through his string of shitty apartments with shittier roommates. People who get mad when Klaus drinks their liquor or smokes their weed, or when his intoxicated ass writes notes to himself in Sharpie directly on the refrigerator, or lounges in the bathtub until it goes cold.

Sporadic night terrors, Klaus has found, can also be a deal breaker.

So Klaus bounces between Craigslist sublets. Long eyelashes and wicked smiles underneath nightclub lights can usually secure him a place to sleep in the time that falls through the cracks. He doesn't mind having a warm body in bed next to his own, either. With no close friends and no family left to speak of, Klaus will take a friendly touch anywhere he can get it.

But Klaus never stays. He's good at keeping someone's attention when he's shiny and new, but being constantly dogged by ghosts is sort of like having a hit out on him. Never safe to sit still for too long.

Besides, life outside the Academy quickly forces Klaus to realize he's not built for relationships with real people.

"What do you do for fun?" asks some girl, any girl, while Klaus rolls a joint on her coffee table with surgical precision.

_This_ , he thinks, but that's not exactly right. This isn't fun. It's sanity. It's survival.

If Klaus hangs around long enough, everyone eventually comes to look at him like he's the human embodiment of morning breath after a night of getting fucked up. Klaus's whole childhood should have prepared him for that, but somehow didn't. So Klaus picks up and sheds casual acquaintances like pieces of a wardrobe, ignores the hurt, and tells himself it doesn't matter.

Holding down a job is out of the question, but money shows up in Klaus's bank account every month without fail. Klaus doesn't know why Dad does it. Maybe he gets off on issuing this periodic reminder that Klaus isn't really free of the Academy and never will be. Like Klaus is a rambunctious dog that just needs to blow off steam outside before inevitably being called back in. Purely out of spite, Klaus sometimes considers closing the account, but. You know. Food, and stuff.

Klaus doesn't spend much on food. Most everything he eats comes prepackaged and preprocessed to the point of being only debatably food. Klaus budgets for drugs above all else.

He has a whole Batman belt of ways to ward off the dead, now. Ben approves of exactly none of them, no matter how Klaus tries to explain the way LSD fans out the black-and-white world into a rainbow, or molly makes him fall ass-over-teakettle in love with the whole universe at once.

Ben says that Klaus is curdling his brain. Klaus says that Ben, and everyone else for that matter, should be banned from the word _curdle_. It's no _moist_ , but it's up there.

"It's like you're competing with yourself to see how many poor life decisions you can make in a single day," Ben says, watching Klaus pull out a wad of cash from across the alleyway. Ben hangs back like this whenever Klaus is buying, as if he's afraid he'll catch delinquency.

"Relax," Klaus says, heedless of the man counting out his bills. This guy's overheard enough of Klaus's one-sided conversations to be unfazed. "If alien invaders, murderbots, and wannabe world dominators didn't manage to take me out when I was a literal child, I doubt a little speed will do the trick now."

Ben is unamused.

"Look at it this way," Klaus says, taking his purchase with a Namaste bow and turning to Ben. "If I do die, then you get to say 'I told you so' in, like, two seconds when I reboot as a ghost."

Ben, looking mollified at the prospect of getting to shove it in Klaus's face if he dies, gives this one a pass.

Klaus will get sober before he admits it out loud, but Ben's nagging is kind of nice. It's not like Luther's generic _just say no_ disapproval. Or that time Diego basically told Klaus he was wasting a lease on life that should have been Ben's.

Ben, or at least Klaus's dreamed-up version of him, cares because he cares about Klaus. How ‘bout that.

Of course, practically speaking, there's no way Klaus could actually take Ben's advice. With Klaus's expanding repertoire of ways to escape himself, ghosts only skirt around the edges of his life these days, and only appear in the rare windows between highs.

_"You must become the master of your own life, Number Four. Or it will become the master of you."_

Yeah, well, Klaus has mastered the fuck out of a ghost-free life. Take that, Dad.

It's not much of a life, if you ask Ben—which Klaus never does, although Ben is quick to offer an opinion anyway. Still. It's _Klaus's_ life. His. And he's got this shit on lock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! It's been ages since I posted anything, so it feels a little weird to be getting back on the AO3 horse, but excited to dive into a new fandom!
> 
> This fic was supposed to be a short, h/c self-prompt based on the summary, and then mutated into me trying to explain to myself why no one seems to understand Klaus's powers or know that Ben is following him around, etc, and became a self-indulgent 40k of Klaus Feels. 
> 
> Thank you sevenimpossiblethings for graciously agreeing to beta (even before you'd watched TUA!) this not-so-short excursion into Klaus angst :)
> 
> Come cry about Klaus or h/c things on tumblr with me: @AGreatPerhaps12


	2. Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi friends! Just a more specific warning on this chapter for brief mentions of suicidal ideation, (specifically in the subsection that begins "Sobriety, once an uncomfortable, necessary evil," if you'd rather skip).

Klaus's early twenties pass like a night time-lapse of city traffic.

He wakes up in apartments he doesn't remember entering, or with tattoos he doesn't remember getting. Even with visits from Ben—who, make no mistake, is aging up with Klaus in a distinctly _unghostlike_ manner, just saying—the Academy already feels like several lifetimes ago.

Klaus sometimes catches Luther on the news, in B-roll of him saving citizens or interviews about how he saved said citizens. The last time Klaus came face-to-face with one of his siblings, he was admiring Allison's _Vanity Fair_ cover.

Klaus never sees Vanya or Diego.

That is, until Klaus is arrested for public urination, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and... maybe something else. He's a little hazy on the details.

Here's what he knows.

Klaus was at a bar, trying to get a drink, but the bartender wouldn't serve him.

"That's homophobic," Klaus declared, whipping his boa across his shoulder and gently thwacking the face of the man at the bar beside him.

"It's our _policy_ not to accept expired IDs," the bartender said, and handed Klaus's back.

"Expired?" Klaus squinted down at the card. "Oh, shit. We turned twenty-five yesterday." He looked up at Ben. "Did you know we turned twenty-five?"

"Yes," Ben said, because even in Klaus's imagination, Ben was the kind of responsible adult who remembered things like what age he was supposed to be.

"Huh. I didn't even notice."

“Because you’ve effectively been marinating your brain in battery acid for the better part of a decade,” Ben explained gently.

"There is that," Klaus agreed. "But, hey—this calls for celebration. Bartender!"

"Klaus."

"Oh, right. Never mind!" Klaus waved the bartender off and wove his way through the crowd toward the exit, intent on visiting his usual corner shop where he wouldn't be burdened with something as trivial as valid ID.

"Should you tell your friends that you're leaving?" Ben said.

"Nah, they won't miss me."

Who did Klaus come here with, again? Ah, right, neighbors. Generous of Ben to call them friends, although Klaus supposed they were the closest thing he had at the moment. Besides his trusty imaginary dead brother, currently gliding straight through people as Klaus ducked around elbows and tossed out a series of _excuse me, pardon me_ 's.

"Where to?" Ben said, once Klaus had secured a bottle of gin.

Klaus tapped his chin. He wasn't keen on going home, where he knew the guy who was nominally his boyfriend was currently screwing someone else. Klaus ended up on a park bench instead and then, when it started raining, under an awning outside a convenience store.

From there, Klaus's memory skip-stops forward. He gets steadily drunker, the rain comes down steadily heavier, and Klaus's need to pee becomes steadily more urgent.

Klaus is in front of the guy at the convenience store counter. "Bathroom key, please?"

"Bathroom's for paying customers only." The guy points to a sign that says as much without looking up from his phone.

If Ben were here, he'd tell Klaus to leave it. Go home, already. But Ben fucked right off as soon as Klaus was sufficiently fucked up.

Klaus props his chin on his hand atop the counter and tries, "Pretty please?"

The cashier gives Klaus a once-over, taking in his smokey eye and the purple- and blue-splashed blouse that makes Klaus feel like fireworks, and says, "Fuck off, faggot."

Next thing Klaus knows, he’s being arrested for peeing outside the guy’s store. Possibly also inside the guy’s store? Unclear. However it all shakes out, Klaus now has to pee _again_ , but he’s stuck in a holding cell, whistling ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ because if he doesn’t have the cash to buy a pack of gum as a bathroom pass, he certainly doesn’t have bail.

Klaus doesn't even have company, since he hasn't sobered enough for his mind to conjure up an image of Ben yet. At least he's being spared a lecture. Small blessings.

Or not. Klaus is just wondering whether the corner of his holding cell qualifies as too 'public' a place to urinate when a voice barks, "Hey!" almost literally scaring the piss out of him. Klaus blinks irritably through the pallid fluorescent light at whoever—

"Diego?"

Yup, that's Diego, all right, glaring at Klaus through the cell bars. New scars, new haircut, new muscles, but Klaus would recognize that righteous fury anywhere.

"I can't believe you," Diego says.

Yes, yes, Klaus's life is a ceaseless carnival of disaster. More importantly, "What are you doing here?"

"Bailing your sorry ass out."

A pretty, young police officer arrives outside the cell beside Diego. "See you found him," she says, unlocking the door.

"Thanks for texting," Klaus hears Diego say while he's scrambling to put his shoes back on.

"Lucky I heard Esther say 'Hargreeves' when she was booking him," the officer says. "Can't say I see the resemblance."

Klaus can feel Diego's eyes on him while he struggles to fit a boot over a foot that doesn't feel quite connected to his own body. "We're adopted," Diego says.

Once Klaus's shoes are each on the proper foot, he wraps his boa back around his neck and exits through the door that the officer is holding open for him. "Thank you, m'lady," he says with a wobbly bow.

The officer frowns at him with an eerily Diego-like air of disapproval.

"Come on," Diego says gruffly, planting a hand on Klaus's shoulder to steer him out of the precinct.

"I would say sorry you had to come in on your night off," the officer says, following them down the hall, "but I know 'night off' is not in your vocabulary."

"Crime never sleeps," Diego says. A line Klaus recognizes straight out of Dad's greatest hits.

"Crime doesn't drink all my coffee at four in the morning, either," the officer says.

Diego pauses them by the door. "Coffee tomorrow to pay you back?"

The officer crosses her arms, but her hint of a smile gives her away. "You'd have to buy coffee every day for a year to pay me back."

Diego smirks, but not the cocky slant that Klaus has seen so many times. Something more amused, and softer, and the shock of seeing an entirely new expression on such an old, familiar face makes Klaus blurt, "Wait, are you dating this lady cop?"

The smile slides off Diego's face in an instant. He shoves Klaus forward so hard that Klaus trips over his own feet. " _Move_."

“All right, all right,” Klaus says, adjusting his jacket and batting ineffectually at Diego’s hand.

Out in the parking lot, Klaus starts walking in what he vaguely thinks might be the general direction of home, but Diego grabs his elbow. "This way," he says, and leads Klaus to a police cruiser.

"No way," Klaus says, breaking into a smile. "You're a cop? I would have put money on you being the Bruce Wayne, work-outside-the-law type."

"Shut up and get in," Diego says.

Klaus gets in, but he's never quite gotten the hang of shutting up. "I'll pay you back," Klaus says. "For bail."

"Don't worry about it."

Klaus doesn't know whether that means Diego doesn't believe Klaus has any money, or that Diego doesn't want to be on the hook for another encounter with Klaus, even one that entails Klaus giving him money. In case it's the latter, Klaus shrugs and says, "Suit yourself. A man can buy a lot of Lunchables with that kind of cash."

Diego doesn't dignify that with a response. He twists the key in the ignition. "Where to?"

Klaus opens Diego's console in search of gum and finds only Altoids. Diego would. Klaus slumps back in his seat. "Just drop me off at the nearest bus stop."

"I can take you home."

Well, he could if Klaus had one right now. Technically Klaus still does have one, until tomorrow morning when he plans to move out. Technically Klaus still could have one, if Klaus weren't trying out this new thing called having enough dignity to not stay with assholes who cheat on him more than twice.

Klaus will be the first to say it: Dignity? Extremely inconvenient.

"Klaus." Diego's tone yanks his attention back.

"Just take me to the bus stop," Klaus says, folding his arms.

"I'm giving you a ride," Diego says, like it's a threat.

"Why?"

"Besides the fact that I don't trust you not to wander into traffic?"

Klaus raises his eyebrows because yes, obviously Diego needs a better excuse than that. Klaus could walk into traffic any old day he pleases, and Diego would be none the wiser.

"Klaus. Come on." Diego turns on the puppy dog eyes, which is absolutely not fair. Diego has this secret superpower, where he can switch from waspish to soft on a dime. He didn't use it much when they were kids, probably thanks to Luther, but he's apparently not afraid to pull it out now. Klaus blames the lady cop.

Klaus is about to fall for it, about to let Diego earn his good samaritan points for the day, when Diego says, "You are living somewhere, right?"

In this moment, Klaus doesn’t know who he hates more—himself for not having an easy answer, or Diego for having the audacity to ask.

He could brush it off if this were Luther or Dad seeking confirmation that Klaus really did grow up into the walking tire fire they all expected. The awful thing is that Diego seems to actually care, and that’s not fair. Diego doesn’t get to leave like he did, and still care. He doesn’t get to briefly intersect with Klaus’s life again after seven years and tease him with the idea that he doesn’t have to be so goddamn alone.

“Fuck you, man,” Klaus mumbles, and moves to unbuckle his seatbelt.

“Wait.” Diego, catlike as ever, catches Klaus’s wrist before he can unclick.

Klaus glares up at him. Diego is wearing a strained expression that Klaus might read as apologetic, if Diego ever mastered the art of apologies.

Then, plot twist of all plot twists, Diego says, “I’m sorry.”

Klaus blinks. “What?”

Diego bristles, like he thinks Klaus is goading him into repeating himself. “I shouldn’t have assumed…” Diego trails off and makes a vague gesture that must encompass Klaus’s supposed homelessness, among other presumptions that are probably a lot closer to the truth than Klaus would have Diego know.

Still reeling from the apology, Klaus puts on a smile that feels too tight. “In your defense, I did find these shoes in a dumpster.”

Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. Strictly speaking, Klaus doesn’t remember how he got these shoes. Which means that strictly speaking, they could very well have come from a dumpster.

Diego cracks a smile, which makes a victorious warmth bloom in Klaus’s chest.

“Reconnecting with long-lost family through bold-faced lies?” Ben says from the backseat. “Off to a bang-up start, buddy.”

“Fuck off,” Klaus says by way of greeting.

Ben does not. He tucks his pencil behind his ear and surveys the backseat. “Luther’s still playing vigilante, but Diego's a cop? Weird.”

“That’s what I said,” Klaus says.

“Ghost pal of yours?” Diego says, eyes flicking from the rearview mirror to Klaus.

The warm glow ignited in Klaus’s chest by Diego’s smile is promptly snuffed out. Man, for a second there he really forgot Diego doesn’t know anything.

“Klaus,” Ben prompts gently.

Klaus clears his throat. “Nah, just a hanger-on.” Klaus puts a hand up to the side of his mouth conspiratorially. “I’d actually rather he didn’t find out where I live. If you could drop me off at the subway, I might be able to shake him on the way home.”

“He’s not going to believe you can lose a ghost in a crowd,” says Ben.

Sometimes, the Ben-shaped voice inside Klaus’s head seems to forget how little even the real Ben knew about ghostdom (ghosthood? ghostism?) before he died.

As expected, Diego gives a confused nod but otherwise takes Klaus at his word.

Ten minutes later, Diego is pulling up to the curb beside the staircase down to the subway. Before Klaus gets out, Diego scribbles his number on a piece of scratch paper.

“Just in case,” he says, without specifying in case of what. Fair. When it comes to Klaus, the hypothetical worst-case scenarios are practically limitless.

“I’ll treasure it always,” Klaus says, and kisses the piece of paper before tucking it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

Diego rolls his eyes, but Klaus is not joking. He knows he’ll never actually call; past experience dictates that clinging to someone is a pretty surefire way to get shoved on your ass. No one, not even Klaus, knows how to handle his impossible existence for any sustained period of time.

But Klaus can keep this small scrap of paper. The offer of Diego’s help is so much better than the real thing could ever be.

 

“Even for you, this is stupid,” Ben says. “Really, really stupid.”

“Stick a sock in it," Klaus says.

Alex cocks an eyebrow. He and Klaus haven’t been friendly long enough for him to ignore Klaus’s self-directed ramblings.

“How does it feel? Like, really feel,” Klaus says, to Alex now.

In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter how it feels, as long as it shakes Klaus’s brain chemistry up like a snow globe, so that he doesn’t have to deal with any ghosts—or overbearing hallucinations, _cough cough_ —until everything settles.

Klaus still wants to hear Alex describe it. He’s not a big fan of needles. He needs a little foreplay.

Alex seems to weigh his answer, as though no one’s ever asked him before. “You know,” he says slowly, the way Alex says most things, “when people have near-death experiences. They describe death as like. The feeling that everything is okay now. Just sink into the light.”

Klaus, personally, has never heard a bona fide dead person report any such feeling. But maybe people who skirt around the edge of death like sungrazing comets say things like that. “Sure,” he says.

“Yeah,” Alex says, drawing the word out like a sigh. “That. I hope death feels half as nice as dope.”

Klaus’s eyes cut over to Ben, who’s wearing that stick-up-the-ass expression he always wears when Klaus is about to cross some new, uncrossable line. “I can almost guarantee you it does not,” Klaus says.

Alex shrugs, entirely unconcerned with matters as trivial as life, death, and the universe itself. “All the more reason to get the feeling while it’s good,” he says, and presents Klaus with the syringe.

Oh, and it’s good. It’s so very, very good.

It’s not good in the same way that a cigarette dampens the vibrations inside Klaus’s head, or the fast and furious joyride of a line of coke. Dope is the flesh-and-blood mother Klaus never had, kissing it all better. It’s the sunshine slanting through the window to warm his catnap. The softest blanket, the tightest hug, the kindest friend.

Everything else Klaus has ever ingested, inhaled, or injected to keep the ghosts away may as well have been a series of deadbolts on a door against the zombie apocalypse.

Heroin is a straight-up fucking bunker, and Klaus isn’t coming out for anything.

 

Sobriety, once an uncomfortable, necessary evil, is downright unbearable.

Looking at himself in the mirror is a chore. His eyes are different, and Klaus has to cake on more and more makeup to fake the appearance of life in them. Painting his nails, French-braiding back the top of his hair now it’s long enough—all the things Klaus used to do to make himself feel pretty aren’t fun anymore. They’re like getting dressed: the bare minimum Klaus has to manage to feel like some semblance of a person.

“You can’t keep this up,” Ben says, eyes on the arm that Klaus is currently tying off, rather than Klaus’s face.

The funny thing is, Klaus can. Believe him, Klaus would like nothing more than to get off this ride. The up down, round and round, next hit, next fix. Christ it’s exhausting. Unfortunately, Klaus seems to have an inconvenient indestructibility. Ask any of the EMTs he knows on a first-name basis.

“You don’t have to do this,” Ben says, expression sad, voice weary from delivering the same line as always.

“Yeah, I do,” Klaus sighs. He already feels them coming, like rustling on the other side of a closed door.

The needle goes in easy. Klaus had a hell of a time finding a vein at first, but now he could probably manage with his eyes shut.

Klaus looks up at Ben, to take advantage of whatever time they have left. “I wish you were here.”

“I am,” Ben says for the _n_ th time.

A lump builds in Klaus’s throat, but it’s okay. Happy is coming. Won’t be long now. It’s okay. He’s okay.

Klaus hugs his right arm around his stomach. “I wish it were me instead.”

He’s thought this so many times, but he can’t remember whether he’s ever actually said it out loud.

If Ben were here, he’d be doing something with his life. What, exactly, Klaus doesn’t know. He never asked; while Ben was still around, any kind of post-Academy existence seemed about as attainable as going to the moon.

But Ben would be doing _something_. Creating something, like Allison or Vanya. Helping people, like Luther and Diego. Klaus has got none of that going on. All he does is suck up people’s time and energy, money, and drugs. He’s a black hole.

“I’m useless,” he says. Dad knew it, his siblings knew it. Klaus knows it, too.

“You’re not useless,” Ben says.

Well, most of Klaus knows it, anyway.

“You’re not,” Ben says, and makes an aborted gesture, like he was about to shove Klaus’s shoulder before remembering. “You’re a colossal dumbass, but you’re not useless.”

“I am,” Klaus says.

“If you call yourself useless again, I’m going to sing ‘The Song that Gets on Everybody’s Nerves’ in your ear every night for the rest of your miserable life.”

That tickles a grin out of Klaus, even as something splinters inside him. “I miss you.”

“I’m right here,” Ben says, even as he starts to fade, and Klaus lifts up, up, and away.

 

Klaus doesn’t really have a rock bottom moment. Or maybe he’s been chilling at rock bottom for a while and hasn’t noticed.

The day he decides to get clean for the first time is hardly remarkable. Klaus is soaking in a bubble bath, eating mac ’n cheese, when Chad—Brad? Whoever’s bed Klaus is currently warming—stops in the open doorway. He leans against the doorframe, crosses his arms, and smiles.

“You’re a self-indulgent little thing, aren’t you?” he says, amused, so unlike Luther that it has no business reminding Klaus of his brother, but it _does_.

Klaus digs his nails into his legs beneath the bubbles and pretends to preen until Chad-Brad goes away.

Then he finds himself an empty studio apartment to sublet and leaves the next week without saying goodbye.

“I’m proud of you,” Ben tells Klaus later, when he’s curled up in the fetal position next to the toilet in his new apartment. “You’re doing so well.”

Is he? Because by Klaus’s count, he’s thrown up six times today, which is exactly five more times than he’s stood up. “Don’t patronize me, asshole,” is what Klaus tries to say. “Ngh,” is what comes out.

“You can do this.”

Can he? Klaus is having serious trouble remembering why he thought he might be able to do this in the first place. He hasn’t slept in days. Sleep deprivation makes Klaus feel watered down, like he’s not quite as potent a person as he was before. If that makes sense. Klaus replays it in his head. No, no it doesn’t.

One thing that’s absolutely certain is that Klaus’s whole body feels like it’s been wrenched through a taffy machine. He’s sweating and has goosebumps at the same time. The human body is a fucking joke.

“It has to get worse before it gets better.”

Klaus peels his cheek off the tile floor without opening his eyes. “If I could punch you in the face right now,” he says, but only half means it. Make no mistake, Ben’s platitudes are completely useless. But it’s nice to not feel so alone, even when Klaus’s eyes are closed. Ben could be counting backward from a million, for all Klaus cares, as long as he keeps talking.

_Klaus… Klaus, please…_

“No, no, _no_.” Klaus digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Not now.”

“It’s okay,” Ben says, steady, gentle, like Klaus is a frightened horse poised to buck. “Just ignore her.”

Easier said than done, although Klaus’s latest wave of nausea does help. It’s difficult to cower when you’re busy throwing up.

Unfortunately, the ghost sitting on the lip of the tub is more than willing to wait out a little vomit. A lot of vomit, actually. Klaus is almost impressed at how much vomit. He’s surprised there’s any of his body left, quite frankly, let alone in bile form, after the day he’s had.

 _Klaus, please_ …

Klaus knew that getting clean meant trading in one kind of misery for another. He just hadn’t anticipated how the two particular miseries of withdrawal and opening his third eye would overlap in the interim.

“Leave me _alone_.” Klaus tangles his hands in his shirt to avoid clamping them over his ears. He doesn’t want to shut out Ben.

_Klaus, help me. Klaus…_

“Ben,” Klaus whimpers, not entirely sure what he’s asking for.

“I’m right here,” Ben says. Klaus hears him, or feels him, move from his perch on the counter down onto the floor next to Klaus’s head. “You’re okay.”

Klaus cracks his eyes open to see Ben’s knee a few inches from his face. He wants to scoot forward, to hide himself in someone else. Seek comfort in the warmth of solid presence. But even Klaus’s diluted self has enough sense to know it would be painfully useless. When you get right down to it, Klaus is alone. Just like—just like—

“Klaus. You’re in your bathroom. It’s 2016. You are not inside the mausoleum.”

Klaus makes a grumpy noise. He _knows_ where he is, Ben. That doesn’t stop his imagination from serving up traumatic flashbacks behind his eyelids. Or that bitch on the tub moaning his name.

“I can’t do this,” Klaus says, shaking his head against the floor. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t go back.”

“You _can_ do this,” Ben says, emphatic almost to the point of anger. “And you’re not going back. You don’t ever have to go back.”

“No,” Klaus says. He’s not explaining himself right. He shudders violently. “I can’t go back to remembering.”

When Klaus can think clearly enough to remember, there’s no escape. Eyes open? Ghosts. Eyes closed? Ghosts of ghosts. It’s too much. It hurts too much.

Ben stares down at Klaus with a pained expression for several long seconds. “I’m sorry,” he says, “that I didn’t know. When we were kids.”

Klaus is too dehydrated to cry, but his body is making a valiant effort at it anyway. “I never told you.”

“Why not?”

Klaus has relitigated this to himself so many times. “You were a kid,” is the official party line.

“So were you.”

“You couldn’t have done anything.”

Ben doesn’t have a quick comeback to that, which may be a lack of imagination on Klaus’s part. Ben was a problem-solver. Who knows. Maybe if Klaus had owned up to his ongoing internal implosion when they were kids, Ben could have figured out a way to help. He might have led Klaus through breathing exercises, at least, like phantom-Ben does now. But even that’s a band-aid on a festering wound.

Another wave of nausea rolls over Klaus. “I can’t do this,” he whimpers. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Ben says. “You were kicking supervillain ass before you learned how to shave. A little withdrawal isn’t going to kill you.”

Klaus makes an undignified noise, cringing and gripping his stomach.

“You. can. do. this.”

 

He can’t.

 

“You can’t do it alone,” Ben concedes months later, which is the closest he’s ever come to admitting that Klaus really is alone.

A lesser man would say, “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” Klaus, pillar of maturity and grace that he is, settles for a _You think?_ eyebrow quirk.

By now, Klaus has several spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to get sober under his belt. At his best, Klaus has managed to stretch sobriety into an agonizing week. He always snaps back like a rubber band.

Klaus doesn’t know what fantasy world Ben is living in, where Klaus has any options besides doing this alone. Back here in the real world, Klaus has zero, count _zero_ reliable emergency contacts in his mental rolodex.

“You could go to a meeting,” Ben suggests.

Klaus makes an unenthusiastic noise. He doesn’t see how listening to a bunch of people rehash what makes them want to get high is supposed to keep Klaus from wanting to get high. And it’s not like the average NA attendee is likely to believe the reasons Klaus wants to get high anyway, let alone have useful advice for overcoming them.

“You could try rehab,” Ben says.

“Sure,” Klaus laughs. “Let’s lock me up in a building against my will. What could possibly go wrong?”

“We’re not talking about having you committed,” Ben says, with an eye roll that makes entirely too light of such dire circumstances, if you ask Klaus.

“Might as well be.”

“Yeah, well. You’re the kind of person who needs all his options taken away,” Ben says.

“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” Klaus says, even though (a) Ben is probably right, and (b) Ben regularly displays vastly more confidence in Klaus than he does in himself.

“What have you got to lose?” Ben says.

Another solid point. How is it that Klaus ends up losing even the arguments he has with his own imagination.

Because seriously. What _does_ he have to lose? His monthly attempts at DIY detox?

Klaus has gone through this so many tired times that he knows what order to expect his symptoms. Muscle aches serve as the ‘check engine’ light before the rest of his body breaks down. Vomiting is almost casual by now. Klaus has memorized the patterns of water stains on his bathroom ceiling.

The only thing is. When Klaus is puddled on his own bathroom floor, at least he doesn’t have an audience. It seems rude to fall apart like that in front of total strangers.

 

As it turns out, no one in rehab seems especially surprised when Klaus does weird shit like hide under his bed, hugging himself in the fetal position until Ben can coax him into breathing normally, or startles at someone turning a corner too quickly or tapping him on the shoulder.

“Really takes a lot to faze you guys, doesn’t it?” Klaus says to the nurse who’s offering him tissues in the wake of his latest panic attack.

“You haven’t shat the bed yet,” she says, which could be figurative or literal.

Klaus sincerely hopes he’s out of potential literal bedshitting territory by now. A week in, most of his withdrawal symptoms have tapered off. Klaus could kiss whoever invented methadone. Now, he mostly just feels tired.

Klaus doesn’t sleep much. Sometimes, Ben reads aloud to him while Klaus stares at the wall across from his bed at night. Ben is around nearly constantly, now. That helps. Especially given that Ben’s in a much better mood than he used to be, when he would show up with a _well well well_ expression whenever Klaus decided to get sober, and disappear with a disappointed head shake the moment Klaus inevitably ended up back on his bullshit.

Being around real people helps, too. More than Klaus expected. He didn’t realize, until he was suddenly surrounded with people all the time, how isolated he’d become. When was the last time that Klaus went out? Or talked to someone who wasn’t Ben, besides answering ‘Paper or plastic?’ or saying ‘Excuse me’ on the train?

Klaus tells a nurse that her winged eyeliner is on point and her bashful grin knocks the breath out of him. He forgot people could make you feel like that. What a thing.

Klaus hugs the memory of that feeling close later that night, while he tries to ignore the victims of a murder-suicide arguing loudly near the foot of his bed.

“I made someone smile. I made someone smile,” he murmurs to himself.

“Yeah you did,” says Ben, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall near the head of Klaus’s bed. “You’re doing great.”

The crazy thing is, Klaus almost kinda believes him a little bit.

Of course, rehab can only get so close to addressing the root of Klaus’s problems. Take therapy. That first session, Klaus does make an honest attempt at, well, honesty. This goes about as well as could be expected.

“I’d like to get to know you,” Dr. Reynolds says. “Tell me about yourself.”

“Little old me? What to tell.” Klaus crosses one leg over the other and clasps his hands around his knee. “Well, I’m a Libra. Make of that what you will.”

Dr. Reynolds doesn’t appear to make anything of it. She waits.

Klaus uncrosses his legs, then crosses them again with the other knee on top. Re-clasps his hands.

Being the object of someone’s complete and total attention after being alone for so long is like stepping out of a pitch black room into blinding sun. Sweat beads on the back of Klaus’s neck. This is so much eye contact. Should there be this much eye contact? Klaus would very much like to run away and hide, preferably somewhere under some heavy furniture in the back corner of a dark room, please.

Alas, a ghost by the door is blocking his way. Also, the social conventions that forbid fleeing a room mid-conversation. Mostly the ghost, though.

“Anything else?” Dr. Reynolds says, her face so placid that it’s impossible to tell whether she’s being sarcastic. “Why don’t you tell me what brought you here today.”

 _My schedule_ , Klaus thinks, but doesn’t say, because it would only get him a lecture from Ben. Klaus’s eyes flick over to his brother, who’s sitting on the arm of the sofa between Klaus and the ghost lurking by the door. Ben gives a _go on_ head tilt in the direction of Dr. Reynolds.

Klaus takes a deep breath. Here goes nothing. “I see dead people.”

Dr. Reynolds, to her credit, doesn’t even blink. “Do you,” she says, in a voice that so clearly conveys her disbelief that Klaus practically withers under the intensity of her gaze. Even Ben’s shoulders slump.

Klaus sees two options. One, he could spend the remaining forty-eight minutes of this session, and every other, trying to make Dr. Reynolds believe him. For what? To never see her again after his thirty days are up?

Or, he can give the sci-fi-free version of his tragic backstory. Even without the comic book details, Klaus has plenty of material to throw himself a pity party. Physically abusive father? Check. Emotionally inaccessible mother? Check. Gutter-grade self-worth? Check, check, and check.

“No,” Klaus tells Dr. Reynolds, pulling a repentant face. “I’m a compulsive liar because that was the only way I could get attention, growing up in a household with six siblings.”

“That sounds difficult,” Dr. Reynolds says, sitting up a little straighter, now she’s back on familiar ground. “Why don’t you tell me about it.”

 

Klaus never wants to leave Shinyview. Therapy is still very much meh, but Klaus is eating more vegetables than he has since he left home, he’s taking a yoga class, and he went a short hike in the park with his therapy group yesterday. Klaus has been wearing tie-dye for years, but now he feels like he’s actually earning it, you know?

Sobriety still feels like treading water, most of the time, and there’s a tired little voice in the back of Klaus’s head that whispers, _Aren’t we done yet?_ when he’s left by himself for too long. The distractions are nice. Actually, scratch nice. They’re essential. Ben isn’t even close to the only apparition Klaus can see all the time now. There are actual ghosts trailing him on the daily, and they’re so much easier to drown out when there are other, tangible people around and something to do.

Klaus has no idea how he’s going to deal when he crosses the threshold back into his empty, structureless void of a life.

Dr. Reynolds, Klaus has found, has the annoying habit of asking exactly the questions that Klaus is internally hand-wringing over.

“Let’s talk about your support system,” she says.

Klaus looks over at his emotional support hallucination sitting on Dr. Reynolds’s desk. Ben props his chin on his hands and blinks at Klaus like _Yes, let’s_.

Her closed-mindedness about Klaus’s séance abilities notwithstanding, Ben thoroughly enjoys Dr. Reynolds. It must be a relief for someone else to be Klaus’s voice of reason, for once.

“Well,” Klaus says, and stops, because the extent of Klaus’s absolute aloneness, at least among the living, is difficult to put into words that won’t sound like hyperbole.

“What about your brother, Diego?” Dr. Reynolds says.

A few days ago, Klaus recounted the tale of Diego giving him a ride home from jail. A tactical error, in hindsight.

Ben raises his eyebrows like, _Yes, what_ about _Diego?_

If Klaus were alone, he’d flip Ben the bird. To Dr. Reynolds, he says, “Pass.”

“Why?”

 _Diego does not want to babysit me_.

“I don’t need Diego to babysit me."

“There’s no shame in asking for help,” Dr. Reynolds says.

“You haven’t met Diego.”

“You don’t think your brother would be proud of your sobriety, and want to help you maintain it?”

Klaus opens his mouth, then shuts it. There’s no point denying Diego’s a good guy, because he is. A dick sometimes, but a dick with principles. A dick who explicitly volunteered to be Klaus’s emergency contact.

Klaus wouldn’t say that Diego has seen him at his worst. Getting arrested doesn’t even crack Klaus’s top five worst moments. But it certainly wasn’t great, and even then, Diego offered to help. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything, but now that Klaus is almost standing on his own two feet for once…

Klaus’s hand comes to rest, almost unconsciously, over his thigh where the folded up paper slip with Diego’s number is tucked in his pocket. He thought he’d trained himself out of hoping for things.

Turns out Klaus lacks the proper discipline even for that.

 

“Someone looks ready to compete in the Hunger Games,” is the first thing Klaus says when he opens the shotgun-side door of Diego’s car in the Shinyview drive.

Diego scowls, even though Klaus meant that as a compliment. What _other_ kind of look could Diego possibly be going for, in that getup?

“Get in, idiot,” Diego says.

“Ooh, are we going shopping?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Plenty of time to force Diego to watch _Mean Girls_ now that they’re temporary roomies. Klaus tosses his bag in the back beside Ben and slides into the front seat. He buckles himself up and looks at Diego expectantly.

Diego is regarding Klaus critically. Klaus doesn’t _squirm_ , okay. He just—adjusts himself a smidge for optimal comfort.

“You look good,” Diego says, almost an accusation. He’s clearly not just talking about the winged eyeliner that Klaus got Nurse Washington to teach him how to apply. Even compared to three weeks ago, Klaus knows his cheeks have filled out a little, and his eyes look less like dark pits. Smiling comes easier. Like right now, for instance.

“So, what made you decide to finally get clean,” Diego says as he starts up the car. Same old Diego—no small-talk, straight for the jugular.

“Why does anyone do anything?” Klaus says. “To spite an ex-lover.” Only mostly joking.

Diego nods seriously, clearly well-versed in making major life decisions by spite. “Think it’ll stick?”

Isn’t that the million-dollar question. “Guess we’ll see,” Klaus says, kicking off his shoes to prop his bare feet on the dash. Diego knocks them down without taking his eyes off the road. Klaus folds his legs criss-cross-applesauce beneath his butt instead.

“I was glad you called,” Diego says. He’s still not looking at Klaus, but the leather of his gloves squeeks as he tightens his grip on the wheel.

Suddenly, it’s difficult to talk around the burn in Klaus’s throat. “Thanks for picking up.”

Diego nods, curtly. He turns on the radio and swivels the channel to the local ‘80s station, clearly having exceeded his tolerance for heartfelt conversation.

 

Diego drives them to a boxing gym of all places. Klaus, operating under the assumption that Diego is making a pitstop on the way home, stays in his seat when Diego gets out. Diego ducks down to look at him. “I’m not gonna open the door for you,” he says.

Klaus, still confused but sure of an order when he hears one, gets out. Diego grabs his duffel from the back and drops it into Klaus’s arms. “This all you’ve got?” he says.

“Pretty much.”

“Good.”

The darkened gym is filled with the echoed grunts of fighters in the ring. Guys in workout shorts with towels slung over their shoulders greet Diego with upward jerks of the head. Klaus feels their eyes linger on him.

Klaus, who’d normally bloom under that kind of attention in the technicolor illumination of a club, pulls his jacket tighter around his crop-top and hugs his bag to his stomach. Klaus knows these types of guys. He grew up with one, and he’s been shoulder-checked and spat on by several since.

If he had something, anything to take the edge off his anxiety, Klaus might have faked a flaunt in his walk. Diego wasn’t wrong; he _does_ look good today. As it is, Klaus follows Diego to the back while studiously avoiding eye contact and angling his head toward Ben’s profile beside him.

Klaus exchanges a glance with Ben when Diego opens the door to the boiler room and ushers Klaus inside.

“Make yourself at home,” Diego says, unclipping the harness of knife holsters from around his chest and walking over to his bed to toss it on the thin mattress.

Klaus has slept in alleyways homier than this place. Even Ben is looking around like he’s not sure what’s clean enough to sit on, and he doesn’t actually have to touch anything.

For want of a closet, Klaus dumps his bag beside to a yet-unopened air mattress box that Klaus presumes is for him.

“Don’t suppose it’s worth asking if you’ve got a full bath,” Klaus says.

“There are showers in the gym locker room,” Diego says.

Looks like Klaus will be investing in a pair of flip-flops. “Bet your lady loves that,” he says.

“Lady,” Diego says, face completely neutral.

“The cop?”

Diego’s mouth turns down. “We’re not together anymore.”

“Oh.” Right, because change is normal. Not everyone’s life has been stuck in the same, stagnant state for more than a decade like Klaus’s has. Klaus tries for a brotherly, teasing smile. “That make things awkward at work?”

“I’m not on the force anymore.”

Ben facepalms.

“Oh,” Klaus says again. That explains the lack of police cruiser. “Guess I was right about the Bruce Wayne thing though, huh?”

For a split second, Klaus legitimately thinks Diego might be about to kick him out, but then Diego grins. “Welcome to my Bat Cave.”

“I would genuinely not be surprised if you had bats living in here,” Klaus says.

Diego whips a balled-up sock pair at his face with predictably perfect aim.

 

There are no bats—just like there’s no bath, and there’s no TV to watch _Mean Girls_. Despite these crimes against comfort, living with Diego isn’t half bad. Diego is out most of the night, every night, on duty as the Friendly Neighborhood Knife-Thrower, so Klaus doesn’t run much risk of waking him up with nightmares. During the day, while Diego is asleep or boxing or mopping the gym, Klaus keeps himself busy with cleanup. Diego doesn’t own much, but everything he does own is haphazard and covered in dust, and it feels good to help in whatever small way Klaus can.

Picking up after his brother may be a pathetic purpose in life, but it's _something_.

“Why do you have this?” Klaus says one afternoon, holding up a flamethrower that he found propped up beside the kitchen sink. Or, sink. There’s just the one, in what barely qualifies as a kitchenette.

“In case of home invasion,” Diego says.

“You don’t even lock your door."

Diego shrugs, as though that’s neither here nor there.

“You’re unbelievable,” Klaus says.

“It’s a _precaution_.”

“It’s a _tripping hazard_ ,” Klaus says. “I’m putting it in the corner with the crossbow.”

Tripping hazards in the kitchen don’t especially matter; Diego’s makeshift setup hardly gets used. Diego is even worse about preparing food for himself than Klaus is, which Klaus would have thought impossible. Klaus has survived days solely on uncooked ramen, but even for him, slurping down raw eggs like jello shots is a bridge too far.

In a way, it’s a comfort to know that Klaus isn’t the only one who left home with no fucking clue how to make one of his own. And for a hot second, Klaus feels like he and Diego might be able to bumble their way through it together for longer than the few back-on-his-feet weeks Klaus originally requested.

 

Klaus finds Vanya’s book while he’s organizing Diego’s disaster of a desk. A disaster that Diego may or may not have explicitly told Klaus not to touch. But Diego is out and Klaus is bored and the trio of ghosts on the staircase will not shut up. He needs a distraction.

The sight of his sister’s face on the cover of a book is certainly that.

 _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven_. She didn’t.

“Don’t do it, dude,” says Ben, eyes glued to the book.

“I’m gonna.”

Klaus can’t _not_. If he doesn’t relieve this brain-itching, finger-twitching sensation by reading Vanya’s book, he’s going to relieve it with something else.

His sweaty fingertips slip on the glossy hardback cover when he picks it up. He sits on the edge of Diego’s bed and opens it.

 _My name is Vanya Hargreeves, and this is my story_.

Klaus’s eyes skitter down the pages. Not many of Vanya’s recollections come as a surprise. Klaus, too, remembers all too well their childhood of being treated like lifesize collectables.

The knot of dreadful anticipation in Klaus’s stomach tightens when he reaches an early chapter about the Academy’s training regimen. But he has too much forward momentum to stop. Ben has abandoned all pretense of brake-pumping and is reading over Klaus’s shoulder. Most of the chapter is common knowledge—the sprints, the hand-to-hand combat, et cetera.

And then, Vanya reaches individual training.

Klaus flips past the pages on Luther, Diego, and Allison. His heartbeat is galloping by the time he reaches another mention of his own name.

_Our father never asked me to record Number Four’s exercises. Most of these took place at the local cemetery. As best I could tell, there were two phases to his education: before the Academy’s debut, and after, beginning when we were about sixteen. My theory was that Number Four had achieved some deeper connection with the dead once he'd come of age, which required renewed training. But Number Four was always covert about the nature of his powers, even among the rest of the Academy, and so I cannot begin to guess what this newfound ability might have been._

_Whatever their purpose, the nature of these later sessions appeared more macabre than Number Four’s initial training. Four was very sweet when we were young, but as a teenager became reclusive and standoffish. I’m sure I was not the only one in our family who began to suspect he preferred the dead’s company to our own_ —

The book tumbles out of Klaus’s hands as he crumples in on himself. He curls forward so that his forehead is nearly on level with his knees. He reaches up to knot his fingers in his hair and pull until his scalp stings.

Klaus is losing ground, eroding under the panic lapping at him on all sides, becoming smaller, smaller.

It's stupid to be this shocked. Stupid to be this hurt. He's always known, hasn't he?

But to see it written in plain English.

No one knows. No one knows about—

_Klaus… Avenge me, Klaus… Kill him for me, Klaus…_

Do they all think Klaus really prefers—Does Diego really think—

_Please, protect my daughter, Klaus… She’s all alone… I left her all alone…_

How could Klaus ever tell—ever explain—

_It was agony, Klaus… Why am I still here, Klaus… Why, why, why…_

Ben is on his knees in front of the bed, head ducked down to try to catch Klaus’s eye. He’s saying something. Probably telling Klaus to breathe. Klaus can’t hear over the din inside his head.

Klaus is on the concrete floor now, on his side, knees to his chest. He doesn’t know when that happened. There’s a nonzero chance he fell straight through Ben, though Ben is crouched beside him now, still talking—so earnestly, in fact, that he sort of looks like he’s on the verge of crying. Distantly, Klaus supposes he should make some effort to tune in.

“I know,” Ben is saying. _"I_ know, Klaus.”

What does he know? It takes Klaus several confused moments to realize that Ben is responding to him. Specifically, the stream of ‘Nobody knows’ Klaus is mumbling on repeat.

“I know, Klaus,” Ben says, hands held out but not touching. Never touching. _“I_ know.”

Feeble reassurance, coming from someone who doesn’t exist.

 

Klaus isn’t sober for a long time after that.

Abstinence does indeed make the heart grow fonder—and the kickback stronger. His first time back on the heroin horse, Klaus wakes up in an ambulance.

Klaus swaps needle pricks for pills. His head (or rather, Ben) says that OxyContin is basically the same as heroin. But his heart says that addiction is, at the very least, more civilized coming out of such an official little orange bottle. That maybe rehab wasn’t for nothing, if Klaus can make this one small self-improvement.

Ben calls bullshit, but joke's on him, because now Klaus can unsubscribe from Ben’s lectures whenever he wants.

Klaus does eventually let Ben talk him into mailing Diego an apology note and repayment for the emergency cash he stole out of his brother’s pillowcase to pay for his first fix on the day he found Vanya’s book.

Klaus continues sleeping with the guy whose apartment he used as a return address for a couple weeks, just to see whether Diego will respond.

He doesn't, but he does pick up when Klaus calls him a few months after that, from a payphone outside a club. Klaus's dance partner was getting aggressively handsy in a way that made his stomach flip, and not in the good way. Diego's sure to look mad as hell when he rolls up, and menacing is exactly the kind of companion Klaus wants right now, in case he's followed out here.

Right on cue, Diego pulls up with a world-class glower. Klaus doesn't even care. He glides up to Diego's car with a grin, floaty with the relief of not having to be outside, exposed any longer.

"Diego. Light of my life. White-steed knight. Thank you," Klaus says, sliding into his seat. "You would not believe the night I've had."

"Yeah, looks like a tough one," Diego deadpans.

Klaus merely hums. Not even Diego's sarcasm can drag him down when he's feeling so free, peeling out of the parking lot with no possessive fingertips pressing bruises into his hips.

Such a shame, how tonight turned out. That first electric eye contact was so promising.

This one was going to tide Klaus over until his next certain living situation this weekend. This one was going to give Klaus something to do other than suffer nightmare-riddled sleep on the anniversary of Ben's death. This one might have made Klaus blueberry pancakes, like the last one did, and Klaus might have closed his eyes and imagined for a moment that he'd found something like a home.

But Klaus has been around the block enough times to know how it usually turns out, going home with a guy whose grip was too tight on the dance floor.

C'est la vie.

"What happened to sobriety?" Diego says, reeling Klaus's mind back to the present.

They're sitting at a red light, so Klaus can't pretend to be distracted with passing foliage or signage or anything. Well played.

"Sobriety? I don't know her," Klaus says. Slurs, actually. _Slurs_. Even the word feels frictionless.

Diego exhales through his nose. "I was—I really—Don't you get how much—" He cuts himself off, in favor of glaring silently at the road ahead.

Klaus squints. Even when words fail him, Klaus usually has a pretty good idea what Diego is trying to spit out. Right now, Klaus can't begin to guess where Diego is going with this.

Nowhere, apparently. At least for the span of several intersections.

Klaus is tapping his knuckles against the window to the rhythm of Toto's 'Africa' when Diego finally says, "I was worried. You left without saying anything. For like, months."

Klaus opens his mouth. Closes it. Searches his brain for the proper response.

Error 404 Not Found.

"What?" he blurts.

 _Eloquent_ , Klaus snarks at himself, since Ben isn't here to do it.

Diego says nothing, which Klaus takes to mean, _You heard what I said_.

"I didn't think—" Klaus says, and pauses to figure out how to word this next part.

"I'm shocked."

Klaus thwacks Diego's arm with the back of his hand. "Shut up. I didn't think that you'd. You know." Klaus gestures expansively. "That you'd want me around. Like this."

Klaus catches Diego turning to look at him in his peripheral vision, but he keeps his own eyes out the windshield. One of them has to.

Diego looks forward again. "Jesus, Klaus. You're so."

Klaus doesn't find out what he is. Diego can't seem to push himself over that particular mental speed bump. That's okay. Klaus knows exactly what he is. He doesn't need Diego to say it.

"I don't like it when you're l-like this," Diego says. "That doesn't mean. J-just. Call me. Okay?"

The stutter is what makes Klaus look over.

Diego is wearing that same ridiculous Black Widow costume Klaus saw him wear out of the house—or boiler room, rather—a dozen times. But right now, Diego bears such strong resemblance to his seventeen-year-old self that it pinches something soft and sensitive deep inside Klaus and twists, sharply.

"Call you," Klaus says, clouding his tone with skepticism to mask the relief.

"Yeah," Diego says, without eye contact, because of course. "If you ever."

The open-endedness of it is so quintessentially Diego. He'd give anyone anything, anytime. Gripe about it every second, but do it all the same.

Klaus doesn't want to ruin that by taking too much. But he _wants_.

"If I'm ever on the brink of passing out in a drain pipe," Klaus says.

"Sure," Diego says.

"If it'll make you feel better," Klaus says, like they're both being charitable here. Like Diego isn't one of only two people in the past decade who have made Klaus feel anything close to safe, and the only one that's actually real.

 

Klaus ends up calling Diego short of drowning in a gutter, albeit sparingly.

He calls Diego when he overdraws his account and can't buy anything to eat, even from the 7-Eleven.

He calls Diego when he's so fucked up that he doesn't know what state he's in. ("The same state, dumbshit. You're down the street. Don't move.")

He calls Diego when he's been sober again for nearly a week, and Ben alone can't get Klaus to breathe properly when there are so many ghosts crowding his personal space.

Diego's door is always open, even if Klaus doesn't call first. At least, it's always unlocked when Klaus comes knocking, usually every few weeks. Sometimes in the middle of the night if he's had a particularly shitty nightmare. Diego always welcomes Klaus by telling him to get out—especially when he turns up at two a.m.—but he doesn't throw any knives, which Klaus assumes is how he greets anyone else.

All told, Diego treats Klaus like an outdoor cat: never sure when Klaus is going to show up unannounced, generally unimpressed with the state of him when he does, but usually willing to feed him anyway.

"You're taking advantage," Ben says during one of his appearances—more sporadic, now that Klaus has relapsed again. He's a little faded even now, through the wispy haze of marijuana that hasn't cleared from Klaus's system.

"Psh, no," Klaus says, studiously ignoring the fact that he just got off the phone with Diego, who he roused from a nap and pretty-pleased his way into a ride to Burger King despite Diego's twelve refusals.

"Yes," Ben says.

Klaus chews his lip. "You think?"

"I know." Ben looks very serious, even for Ben. "You don't see the way he looks when you're fucked up."

Neither does Ben, although Klaus politely refrains from point this out. Ben gets irritated when Klaus reminds him of his nonexistence. Klaus folds his arms and pretends to ignore Ben while he mulls over the possibility that this might be a subconscious warning sign to keep his distance. That Klaus is, as ever, a parasite who can’t hope to do anything for Diego but bleed him dry.

Klaus rubs a hand over his chest like he can physically relieve the ache there.

The thing about hanging out with Diego is. Klaus knows he's being a burden every second of it. He knows, okay? But it only means that much more, when Diego will give Klaus a ride from anywhere to anywhere.

Diego may think Klaus is a self-indulgent man-child, and he's liberal about reminding Klaus of this. But he isn't _cruel_ about it. At least he looks at Klaus like he's a human being, rather than a glittery plaything or a filthy junkie or a corporeal errand boy.

Klaus doesn't want to give that up. He's so, so tired of being alone.

But what can he do? Klaus is still only himself.

"All right then, Jiminy Cricket," Klaus sighs. "What do you suggest?"

"You know," Ben says.

Klaus sighs again. Yeah, he does. Dammit.

 

When Klaus learns that Reginald Hargreeves is dead, his first thought is that he's going to need to be six kinds of high to process this. An unfortunate impossibility, given the circumstances. Those circumstances being his recent resuscitation in the back of an ambulance.

Even if Klaus could convince the driver to drop him off somewhere that is not a hospital—which Klaus has tried and failed to do on several occasions—he has no cash in his pockets. Just the stupid thirty-day chip that shot his tolerance and landed him on a gurney in the first place.

Which brings Klaus to a more pressing and less emotionally fraught matter than Dad's death: Dad's money. Chiefly, whether any of Dad's money is going to keep turning into Klaus's money on a monthly basis. And if not, then what.

Klaus pushes sweat-damp hair off his face and rubs his eyes. He is, potentially, very much fucked. But on the plus side, dire financials are something to focus on besides the very real possibility that the next ghost Klaus sees when he opens his eyes will be his father.

Klaus shivers and keeps his eyes screwed shut just in case.

He wishes Ben were here.

 

"You should go."

Klaus kicks at Ben's shin. His foot swings straight through, of course, but it's the thought that counts. "Do I have to?"

"Yes," Ben says, with a great deal of authority for someone who's in no position to make literally anyone do anything ever. But Ben's visage has always had a great deal of sway over Klaus, and he knows it.

Exhibit A: the fact that Klaus is already standing at the bus stop, even though he's far from finished arguing the matter.

"Why?"

Klaus hasn't been back to the mansion since ducking out in the dead of night with a duffel slung over his shoulder nearly twelve years ago. The idea of returning, even now that Dad is gone, makes Klaus's gut twist. He crosses his arms over his chest and pillows his cheek against the back of his left hand, where it's clinging to his right shoulder.

"Closure," Ben says.

It might be a relief to see Dad lowered into the ground, or scattered to the wind, or however else the body is being dealt with. Klaus isn't totally clear on the logistics. He only knows people are gathering because of an invitation from Pogo that came by way of Diego, who also seemed less than thrilled at the prospect.

Diego might actually get some closure from laying eyes on Dad's remains. If vindictive pleasure counts as closure. But for Klaus, death is never really the end, is it? A funeral is far from a shut door on seeing Dad again, if the old bastard does decide to pay a visit.

Dad hasn't reappeared yet, but then, this is only the second time Klaus has been close to clear-headed since he got the news. The only reason Klaus isn't self-medicated out of his mind right now is that he doesn't want Ben to go. But his fingers are already twitching, and he's been jumping at more shadows than usual. The desperate impulse to put himself back under mounts with every passing minute.

Klaus hugs his jacket tighter around his body. "What if he shows up?" he says, plaintive.

"He could show up anywhere," Ben says, not unreasonably.

A slightly hysterical laugh bubbles out of Klaus. "Wow, thank you. I feel so much better."

"At least if you're home, you're not alone."

Sure, at home. With Allison, who's risen about as far as Klaus has fallen since running away. With Luther, who's Luther. With Vanya, who thinks Klaus would rather hang out with the restless spirits that have tormented every waking, sober hour of his life than any of the rest of them.

(If Vanya dares show up, that is. Klaus read the rest of her book during his third stint in rehab, because he has no impulse control. If he'd published a book dishing on half the stuff Vanya did, you couldn't pay Klaus to stand in the same room as Luther.)

"You know you want to see them," Ben says.

Klaus chews the inside of his cheek and doesn't respond because...he does. Dammit, he really, really does.

Needing people is the worst. Especially when no one wants you, and you're not sure how to become the kind of person someone could want, or whether it's even possible to become that kind of person, given—how you are.

But Klaus hasn't settled once since he left the Academy. The closest he's gotten is falling back in with Diego. Klaus wants more of that. He wants anyone who will take him, however they'll take him. And his family has to take him, right?

"You can do this," Ben says as the bus pulls up. "I'll be right there."

Klaus nods, steels himself, and steps on board.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Thanks so much to the folks who responded to the last chapter :D And of course to sevenimpossiblethings for her continued wonderful beta-ship.


	3. Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Special note to folks reading who I know haven't seen the show: this chap largely follows the timeline of S1, so if a lot of it doesn't make sense...this is why ^^ by the end of the chapter we take a sharp exit ramp from canon and all of Pt 4 is fix-it and so will narratively be more comprehensive. All right! Onward.

Ben isn’t with Klaus when he arrives at the Academy, because Klaus chickened out and made a pitstop on the way. He crosses the threshold of his childhood home on a mental magic carpet of narcotics. This is surely not what Ben had in mind, but Klaus thinks he’s entitled to points for showing up at all.

His mental detachment pretty immediately comes in handy, making it slightly more bearable when Allison hesitates to hug Klaus back, and when Luther cuts their reunion short by kicking Klaus out of Dad’s office.

But Klaus will admit that he would trade his high for Ben’s company when Luther commands him to Conjure Dad.

 _Conjure Dad_. Bring him here. Face-to-face. On purpose.

If Klaus’s head were screwed halfway on straight, he might have descended into a panic attack right here in the parlor.

None of the others bats an eye at Luther’s request, because why should they? Klaus is so keenly aware of Vanya sitting on the sofa beside him that he can practically feel her body heat. He feels so horribly alone, yet stifled at the same time, and would like very much to slink upstairs and hide under his bed.

Of course, as soon as everyone disbands, a not-insignificant part of Klaus wishes they’d all come back. His stupid, attention-starved lizard brain is irrational like that.

As it is, Klaus is left alone to circle around to the bar, where he sets down Dad’s urn and stares at it.

 _I hate you_ , he thinks. Like Dad would care.

Klaus imagines Dad’s ghost slithering out of the urn, genie-style, and hovering over him with that _you disgust me_ scowl imprinted on Klaus’s amygdala from childhood. He shudders.

He really, really doesn’t want to Conjure Dad. He shouldn’t have to Conjure Dad. He hates Luther a little for having the audacity to ask, but.

When’s the last time any of Klaus’s sibling asked him for help?

Klaus swallows and shoves the image of his father’s specter out of his head. Instead, Klaus imagines himself debriefing Luther and the others on his séance session after it’s over. He imagines Luther wearing his intel-gathering frown, looking at Klaus like he matters, for once.

Klaus’s stomach flutters.

Is it pathetic that he wants that?

Obviously.

This fact, tragically, does not make the desire go away.

 

Naturally, the one time in Klaus’s life that he makes an actual, concerted effort to see a ghost, it’s a no-show.

Klaus’s potential for failure truly is infinite.

He’s about ready to throw Dad’s urn out the window in frustration, when Klaus does himself one better by spilling it all over the bar. This signals time for a break. And by break, Klaus means one-man pity-party catered by oxycodone.

 _Dad would hate this_ , Klaus thinks as he dances around the kitchen with what remains of Dad’s ashes.

 _Here I am, old man. In a skirt, gyrating on the kitchen table. Come and get me_.

Shit suddenly gets very real when the lights flicker and Dad’s urn skates across the table into Klaus’s arms. For one petrifying second, despite the alcohol and analgesics humming in his blood, Klaus is half-convinced he’s done it. “Daddy?”

Not even close.

In fact, it’s the single thing in the universe more unlikely than Klaus having any sort of successful interaction with his father: Five unzipping the fabric of spacetime to reappear after nearly two decades M.I.A., looking not a day older than the morning he vanished.

The whole thing is so absurd, Klaus can’t quite believe it. This coming from someone who once did battle with a fire-breathing Lincoln Memorial.

Klaus clears his throat to address the group. “Does anyone else see little Number Five, or is that just me?”

He does have a history of hallucinating long-lost siblings, after all.

 

Ben reappears while Klaus is drifting, featherlike, down, down, down in the back of Diego’s car.

“You were right,” Klaus says to preempt Ben’s gloating. “Today was…”

Dramatic. Exhausting. But above all, good. Kicking back behind Dad’s old desk and making Allison laugh. Sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by his siblings, mutually reveling in that old, familiar, what-the-what feeling of listening to Five explain his latest fuck-you to the laws of physics.

Klaus is still warm and melty inside from Five’s ‘nice dress’ comment. Five is an equal opportunity asshole, and Klaus has heard him mete out maybe a dozen compliments ever. _“Nice dress.”_ Midi skirt, actually, but still. Klaus got a hug _and_ a compliment today.

Good old-fashioned serotonin so rarely does it for him anymore, but right now, Klaus is basking in the bubblegum-pink glow of his own homegrown happy chemicals.

“Told you,” Ben says, placidly smug. “Who knows, you might even make it through tomorrow completely sober.”

Tomorrow. How weird to be facing a tomorrow with some idea of what the day might bring, let alone to feel a little hopeful about it. Sure, today was a total failure, but Klaus’s head is clearer now. He can try again as soon as they’re home. Here, with Diego and Ben, the task of Conjuring Dad seems marginally less impossible.

Except Diego, apparently, is bailing on them for a night of vigilantism.

That’s okay. Klaus can count on Diego to come back before another decade is up, unlike some people. This is fine. Klaus is fine.

“I guess it’s frozen waffles again,” Klaus tells Ben. With a side of self-medication, because no way is Klaus going home to that big, dark house with his mind open and vulnerable to ghosts if he’s alone.

It’s fine, Klaus tells himself again, as Diego peels out of his parking spot. Completely fine. Klaus can put a pin in his Conjuring project for one night. Dad will still be plenty dead in the morning.

 

Dad will still be plenty dead in the afternoon, too, Klaus reasons, as he wanders the house in search of something to pawn.

He did find a couple spare pills between the couch cushions where he slept last night (suck on that, Ben) and has no immediate plans to get high. But setting out to Conjure Dad without a fully stocked stash would be as wise as a leap off a high dive without first checking to make sure there’s water in the pool below.

As Klaus passes Five’s room, a “Hey” from within snares his attention.

Surprised, Klaus takes two steps backward and peers inside. “You rang?”

“What are you doing?” Five says.

“Going to loot Dad’s room,” Klaus says, because he knows Luther is well out of earshot, and Five would as soon set Dad’s room on fire as pillage it.

“Want to make twenty bucks?”

Would Klaus ever. Especially when the memory of Klaus’s nightmare is clinging to him like some kind of mummifying film. This is just the kind of distraction he needs to shake it off.

Klaus steeples his fingers and grins at Five. “What did you have in mind?”

 

Easiest side quest ever.

All Klaus has to do is feign fatherhood for half an hour, and bing-bang-boom he’s not only got twenty dollars in his pocket, but successfully done one of his siblings a solid.

Klaus is barely paying attention to the conversation between Five and Lab Coat. Difficult to concern himself with such things when he’s high as a hot-air balloon.

_“You sure this is a good idea?” Ben said while Klaus pulled the baggie from his pocket, already sounding very much sure that it was not._

_“Does the pope shit in the woods?” Klaus said around the pills in his mouth, adjusting the frilly collar of his best shirt._

_“It’s ‘does a bear shit in the woods,’” Ben said, “or ‘is the pope Catholic.’”_

_“Semantics,” Klaus said, not entirely sure he was using that word correctly, but feeling deeply that it was the kind of word someone wearing such a fancy shirt would say. “And yes, quite sure. Can’t have any fussy phantoms distracting me while I’m undercover with Five, can I?”_

So here Klaus is, mentally fortified against any undead that might float through the door of their closed-door meeting.

From what Klaus can tell, Five wants something, and Lab Coat won’t give it to him because Rules. Strictly confidential this, proprietary information that. This guy is worse than Luther.

"Without the client's consent, I simply can't help you," Lab Coat says.

"We can't get consent if you don't give us a name," Five growls.

Their verbal chess game has been going on for the last ten minutes, and Lab Coat looks about two seconds from calling security.

 _Think. You’re supposed to be helping, asshole, so_ help _._

The only way Klaus knows how to help is what he used to do when chess games between Ben and Five got heated: upturn the board.

In this case, that apparently means punching Five and bludgeoning himself with a snow globe.

Lab Coat does pretty much whatever Five wants after that. Not to brag, but Klaus would say Five definitely got his twenty dollars’ worth.

But when it comes to paying up, or even thanking Klaus, Five suddenly becomes a lot more tight-fisted.

“The apocalypse is coming, and all you can think about is getting high?”

Firstly, Klaus isn’t altogether convinced that Five’s brain hasn’t been spaghettified by time travel, and the apocalypse isn’t some extremely vivid figment of his brother’s imagination. Secondly, if the apocalypse is coming…

How does one explain that he’s been tempting death for his entire life with no success, and that if the whole world is gonna go out, maybe he can go along with it, and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad?

Five seems genuinely upset, though, and he looks so small sitting alone on the steps. Klaus sighs. Even if Five is crazy, it’s not like Klaus can’t sympathize. He does know a little something about having horrifying visions that no one else can possibly understand.

If Ben were here, he’d be nodding in Five’s direction, telling Klaus to go sit with him. Talk to him. Comfort him.

Klaus hesitates. He’s the sibling you call if you need someone to concuss himself with an office nicknack, not offer emotional counsel. But Klaus might understand better than any of the others that deep, echoing loneliness that comes with decades stuck inside your own head.

After returning to human company again after solitude for so long, maybe he and Five both need each other to hold onto.

Only, it turns out Five hasn’t been alone.

“Her name was Dolores. We were together over thirty years.”

This revelation shouldn’t hurt like a sucker punch. Klaus should be happy for Five.

It does hurt. It hurts a lot.

Somehow, even in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, Five had a devoted partnership of a few decades, compared with Klaus’s meager few weeks hanging off the arm of a guy who was more landlord than lover.

Klaus doesn’t know how he’s going to get through the rest of this conversation while emotionally processing Five’s confession. But that doesn’t end up mattering, because when Klaus next turns around, Five is gone.

 

Klaus has gone to a lot of trouble to sober up enough to Conjure Dad, so it’s more than a little irritating that Pogo keeps popping up wherever Klaus is, distracting him with laments about the contents of the box Klaus pawned.

Fine. If Pogo really thinks Dad’s stuff is so much more important than Dad’s ghost, Klaus will go find it.

“Like you weren’t looking for an excuse to bail on Conjuring,” Ben says as Klaus heaves himself over the rim of the dumpster.

He’s not wrong. Klaus would welcome a diversion wherever he can get one. The trick to Conjuring, whenever Dad twisted Klaus’s arm into doing it properly, was focusing intently on the soul to be drawn forth. Picturing their face, imagining their voice, trying to reach through the ether and touch their essence.

Very intimate business, cupping someone else’s soul in the palm of your own.

Whenever Klaus gets remotely close to the proper headspace to Conjure Dad, his breath quickens and his palms start to sweat. Klaus doesn’t _want_ to remember Dad’s face, or his voice, or any part of what his essence felt toward Klaus.

Klaus is basically trying to pull off the spiritual equivalent of sticking his hand into a fire, and every time he gets too close, instinct makes him recoil.

Klaus is still emotionally smarting from his efforts when Five descends the fire escape over the alley where he’s dumpster-diving. Seeing as how he’s making no headway on his current project, Klaus perks up at the opportunity for a distraction from his distraction.

No dice.

“I’m done funding your drug habit.”

One day back in Klaus’s company after decades apart, and Five’s already got him pegged as a useless junkie.

Well, Five always was quick on the uptake.

Klaus does still have Ben, who’s seen Klaus do far stupider things than misplace some irreplaceable family valuables, and so is more forgiving of this latest blunder. Even if he would rather be at the beach, as he has informed Klaus thrice today.

Klaus entertains the idea that his subconscious may be trying to tell him to bathe—or submerge himself in literally any body of water that would clear him of some of his current filth. Klaus pulls out his trusty plastic baggie, because if he isn’t going to be Conjuring Dad this afternoon, there’s no point leaving himself open to other ghosts.

On his way to the bathroom, with a merry whistle between his teeth, Klaus is accosted by Luther. He holds his breath, ready to be told off for slacking, but Luther just says, “Have you seen Five?”

Klaus exhales. Thank Christ, a question he can answer. “He’s out searching for his one-eyed man.”

Luther narrows his eyes. “His what?”

So Five hasn’t clued Luther in. Klaus considers explaining, decides he doesn’t understand it nearly well enough himself to do so, and says, “He’s scouting out a place called Meritech Prosthetics and probably won’t be back for a while.”

“I’ll go get him, then.”

Oh, oh no.

“Uh,” Klaus says, and hurries to put himself in Luther’s path. Despite Luther’s inhuman bulk, Klaus is one hundred percent more afraid of Five than he is of Luther. “Five was pretty much set on being alone.”

“I pretty much don’t care.”

Figures.

Klaus abandons his bath in favor of following Luther out to the cab, because Klaus would rather have Five in his sights than be surprised later by a Five intent on getting revenge for Klaus’s loose lips.

Luther frowns at Klaus as he whistles quietly to himself in the back of the cab.

“Your face’ll get stuck like that if you hold it too long,” Klaus teases.

Luther’s frown deepens. He looks out the window.

Klaus’s whistle trails off. He twists his hands together in his lap and tips his forehead against the window. Maybe when they find Five, he’ll have changed his mind about needing Klaus’s help.

 

Should have known better.

 

Klaus does eventually get his bubble bath.

He passes Five’s room on the way to the bathroom. The sky is navy by now, but Five is still out. For a flicker of a moment, Klaus contemplates going to check on him, but—

_“Luther’s got a point, you should get out.”_

Let it never be said that Klaus doesn’t know how to stay out of the way.

Klaus lets the warm water of the bath swallow him with a soft moan, and tries to think of good things.

  1. Klaus is back in his favorite bathtub,
  2. under a roof he didn’t have to pay for in money or...charm,
  3. with the mystery of the missing monocle solved, absolving Klaus of Conjuring duties,
  4. clearing his schedule to find other, less terrifying means of being useful,
  5. to earn someone’s company or approval or maybe even love, if that’s not getting ahead of—



_Klaus…_

No, no, no. Not now, please—

_Klaus...Klaus…_

Klaus covers his ears. Just for once could they please leave him alone—

_KLAUS!_

Klaus bursts through the bubble bath with a gasp, blinking soap into his eyes and spitting bathwater. He slaps his hands down into the water. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

Klaus swallows a sob and tries to breathe the way Ben would tell him to, if he were here. He’s okay. He’s not trapped in the mausoleum. He’s in the bath, with the door slightly cracked. He’s not stuck. He’s safe. He’s going to be okay.

Trembling fingers find the joint on the windowsill to rein in his runaway heartbeat.

The smoke tastes like home, and it’s a little easier to believe Klaus is safe with music muffling the voices between his ears.

He’s all right. Klaus is going to be okay.

 

Klaus is fucked.

The two villains who have been torturing him for the better part of twelve hours are going to realize eventually that Klaus legitimately doesn’t know anything, and then, well.

Wouldn’t it make Dad proud, Klaus laying down his life for another member of the Academy. A sacrifice made possible only by Klaus’s universally recognized unreliability. Maybe irresponsibility was his superpower all along.

Sleep deprivation makes Klaus giggle at that, earning him a smack upside the head.

For the umpteenth time, Klaus tries to explain: “Nobody tells me shit. The truth is, I’m the one person in that house nobody will even notice is gone.”

How’s that for emotional honesty, Klaus thinks at Dr. Reynolds. Too bad Klaus is telling it to a motel wall. He laughs at himself. Klaus has to laugh, so he doesn’t cry. Because underneath the theatrics, Klaus is very, very afraid.

Klaus has been snatched by baddies before, sure. Kidnap is part and parcel of the superhero life. But Klaus has never been caught alone, when none of his siblings has the slightest inkling where he is. Days could pass before anyone notices Klaus’s Irish Goodbye, and then, they might be relieved Klaus is out of their hair.

If you told Klaus this is how it would end—him tied up, naked, in a seedy motel, at the complete mercy of two sadistic strangers—he probably would have declared himself unsurprised.

Deep, deep down, though, Klaus really believed he’d get to go out on his own terms. Playing Russian roulette with a medley of illicit substances gave a person that kind of confidence. Klaus got too comfortable in the idea that his death would be a choose-your-own-adventure in overdosing.

Klaus never fully appreciated until right now how much that small semblance of control meant to him, and he hates—he _hates_ these two masked bastards for taking it away.

The most control Klaus can eke out now is fucking with them. Feigning arousal during asphyxiation. Slurping up their attempts at waterboarding.

Klaus is going to milk his chaotic neutral for all it’s worth until one of them decides to put a bullet in his brain.

 

The closet is so dark and so small.

Klaus’s face is wet with tears and sweat from the effort of struggling against his binds and screaming into the tape over his mouth. Also, the low-grade fever Klaus is almost certainly running by now.

Everything about Klaus is cinched: Fists balled, teeth clenched, toes curled. His skin feels too tight for his body, his skull too small for his brain. His throat is sore from screaming over the vacuum, but nobody hears. No one comes.

Someone is _right there_ , but no one is coming.

Just like the mausoleum. Klaus is a volcanic eruption of sound, and no one cares.

No one comes.

Klaus may as well stop screaming. He’s as good as dead. He’s going to die alone, with nothing to make the pain go away, and no one is even going to—

“You know what the worst part of being dead is?”

Ben’s voice is a paperweight, pinning down Klaus’s panicked, fluttering thoughts.

“Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost, and pissing it all away.”

Ben’s words steal the air from Klaus’s lungs.

This is the most directly Klaus’s vision of Ben has ever referenced his own death. It’s probably as close to a slap across the face as someone with no corporeal form could manage.

Ben’s right, of course. Klaus is still here. The pain means Klaus is _still here_ , and wouldn’t it be a disgrace to the real Ben’s memory for Klaus to give up before his heart has given out?

Klaus is real. He's alive. He's going to get out. He's real. He's alive. He's going to get out.

Klaus can do things. Klaus once cleaned Diego’s apartment. He made Allison laugh. He got valuable intel for Five.

Klaus doesn’t want to die. Not yet. He wants to ride around in Diego’s car again. He wants to have a thrift-shop dress-up montage with Allison. He wants to make Luther or Five proud.

For the first time in forever, Klaus wants something more than to escape himself.

Screw giving up and dying alone. If Klaus’s own reckless abandon hasn’t managed to kill him yet, he’s not going to let two psychos in rubber masks do the job for him.

 

Their fucking _faces_ when Klaus says the magic words: “Zoya Popova.”

Ben is grinning proudly, and Klaus feels like he’s finally landed on firm ground after nearly twenty-four hours of freefall.

They’re scared. Oh, Klaus likes that. He likes that a lot.

What Klaus likes significantly less is that he’s soon hosting something of a séance soiree, surrounded by ghosts who have died in all manner of horrific ways. You open your mind to _one_ ghost _one_ time and—

Klaus loses his train of thought as his eyes pan over the man with the bloody stumps for arms again. Christ, this horror show is worse than the withdrawal.

He can’t believe he’s doing this. But then, he couldn’t believe he was doing this with that old babushka. Klaus has never voluntarily spoken to a ghost. But Ben told him to, and Ben knew how petrified Klaus was. He knew, and he still thought Klaus could do it. Some part of Klaus must think he can do this.

All right. Game plan. He needs a game plan.

_“This is your chance, Klaus. To control them. Learn their secrets.”_

Klaus inhales, exhales. He’s got this.

  

Out of the motel and into Vietnam is sort of an out of the frying pan, into the fire situation.

In the A Shau Valley, Klaus becomes more intimately familiar with suffering on this side of death than he could have imagined back home.

1968 is, in so many ways, the worst year of Klaus’s life.

But for Dave, Klaus would have stayed forever.

 

Klaus thought he understood pain, you know? Klaus and pain go way back.

Turns out, Klaus was only acquainted with a particular pain.

The baseline, background pain of Klaus’s life, the kind he’s been carrying around since childhood, aches like a bone-deep bruise.

Dave’s death is different. Klaus feels ripped open, with no idea where or how to apply pressure to hold himself together and numb the agony.

He doesn’t know how to be. How is Klaus supposed to keep existing, after this?

But keep existing he does. Back in 2019, in a bus seat, hands covered in slick red gloves of Dave’s blood.

Klaus stands up at the first stop, simply because he’s unable to sit. He steps mechanically off the bus and into the sun.

The sun is what breaks him. How can the fuck can the sun still shine, birds still chirp, passersby discuss dinner plans like Dave didn’t just—like Klaus isn’t—

There’s only so much living and losing a person can do. Klaus wants to rest. Please, isn’t it time for him to rest?

He’s on the ground, hugging his hollowed-out self, sobbing. And the world keeps turning, wholly unconcerned with Klaus Hargreeves’s efforts to will himself into nonexistence.

 

“Klaus.”

Klaus hasn’t heard that voice for nearly a year.

Makes sense. Klaus has spent his whole life trying to make someone love him, and for the most part that’s gone about as well as scaling a sheer cliff face with no footholds. With Dave, though, it was so easy. Easy enough that Klaus’s brain didn’t need an imaginary friend to keep him company.

Now that Klaus is alone again, his brain has reverted to business-as-usual.

“Klaus,” Ben says again, clearly trying to coax him into opening his eyes.

Klaus doesn’t want to. He wants to keep hiding inside himself, where the world can’t hurt him.

“What happened?”

Klaus’s eyes burn behind his eyelids. He pulls his knees closer to his chest.

“Okay,” Ben says, trying for soothing but sounding scared. “Okay.”

Some indefinite amount of time passes, during which Klaus starts and stops crying a couple more times.

Finally, Ben says, “You should take a bath.”

Surprise opens Klaus’s eyes. Ben knows what other indulgences come as a package deal with Klaus’s baths, and he has never, not once, encouraged Klaus to get high. Now, he seems inclined to let Klaus have this, if necessary.

“Yeah?” Klaus says, the word hardly a wisp of sound.

“Yeah,” Ben says, with more finality. “Let’s get you home.”

 

Bathing doesn’t help.

Alcohol doesn’t help.

Finding Dave's photo doesn't help. 

Gazing at Dave’s grainy face smiling out of a time-worn photograph strikes a chord in Klaus that spans several octaves—the highest high of seeing Dave’s patent cheeky grin again, and the lowest low of literally facing the fact that this is all that remains of the love of his life.

Klaus rubs his eyes. God, this was supposed to make him feel better. If not even this makes Klaus feel better, then what the fuck is there left to do?

Klaus jolts at the hand that claps down on his shoulder, expecting a fight, but finding Diego. There might still be a fight. One never knows, with Diego.

“Just go away, please.”

“Not until you talk to me.”

Diego never knew when to leave well enough alone, but Klaus secretly hopes he’ll push. He hopes Diego will demand that Klaus talk, because Klaus doesn’t know how to do it on his own. In his defense, this is only the second time Diego’s ever really asked. Only the second time anyone’s ever asked.

_"I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong.”_

Last time, Klaus didn’t think he stood a chance of properly explaining what was wrong. This time, he might be able to. Losing a loved one is within the realm of normal human understanding, no superpower necessary.

Maybe today, Klaus can tell. Maybe he doesn’t have to be as alone as his seventeen-year-old self.

 

Klaus certainly feels like his seventeen-year-old self, sitting in Diego’s car and getting berated for having too big a mouth, for doing too many drugs, et cetera, et cetera. Same shit, different decade.

Don’t get Klaus wrong, he’s touched that Diego stood up for him against a guy who clearly didn’t get the memo about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell being repealed. He’s touched that Diego swallowed his oversized pride to apologize on Klaus’s behalf, but:

“All that shit you do is weakness.”

God, isn’t he as sick of this conversation as Klaus is?

Klaus ignores Diego in favor of pulling out another pill. Diego smacks him, dislodging the pill from between Klaus’s fingers.

“Don’t hit me, asshole!”

“Don’t tell me everything is all right!” Diego snaps, right up in Klaus’s space, with a finger in Klaus’s face. “Because I saw you in there. You were crying like a baby!”

“Because I lost someone!”

There, he said it.

Holy shit, Klaus really said it.

Diego goes quiet. Klaus is left suspended in the open air of Diego’s open-mouthed silence, hoping he wasn’t wrong to trust his brother to catch him.

Klaus doesn’t know what he’s expecting. Deep down, swaddled up in seven layers of cynicism, maybe he’s holding onto some fragile hope for a hug. Realistically, he’d take a pat on the shoulder. A simple “I’m sorry, that sucks” might be enough to set Klaus off crying again, honestly.

Klaus swallows his pill to endure the anticipation. _Say something. Anything._

“You’re luckier than most.”

Anything but that.

“When you lose someone, at least you can see them whenever you want.”

No. No no no, that can’t be all. _That can’t be all._

But that is all. Diego is finished, and Klaus’s heart is anvil-heavy in his chest.

No hug. Diego’s just going to dump some salt over Klaus’s wounds and grind his heel on them for good measure. Cool. Cool cool cool.

Maybe Klaus’s seventeen-year-old self was acting on good instinct, not spilling his guts to Diego. Lesson learned. Won’t make that mistake again.

 

“The craziest thing was, he didn’t think I was crazy. When I told him about, you know.” Klaus taps his temple with two fingers. “He just nodded and said, ‘My Great Aunt Adara had The Sight.’”

A weak, reminiscent smile pulls at Klaus’s lips. He’d been so scared of telling Dave, but Dave somehow managed to make even that easy.

Ben smiles too. “Not like you, I’m sure,” he says.

Ben’s image is staticky, the way he usually appears when Klaus is starting to come down.

“I hope not, for her sake,” Klaus says, twisting noodles idly around his chopsticks. He’s not really in the mood to eat, but his stomach (and Ben) insists. Really works up an appetite, saving one idiot brother from your ex-torturers, only to chase down said ex-torturers in an ice cream truck so they can’t murder your other two idiot brothers.

Klaus is currently curled up in the corner of his bed with a fuzzy blanket and a takeout box of chicken lo mein on his lap. Ben sits across from him.

“I can’t imagine what that was like,” Ben says. “Being surrounded by all that death.”

“Oh, sweet summer Ben,” Klaus says. “I’ve had more difficulty getting dope in 2018 than I did in 1968.”

Ben is not appeased. “Still.”

Klaus shrugs. He’d rather not dwell on it. “I had a pretty good distraction.”

“You loved him.”

“More than anything.” Every time Klaus says it, he’s surprised and unsurprised in equal measure how true it is.

Ben is silent for a suspiciously long while.

Klaus lifts an eyebrow. “Something to share with the class?”

“Diego was right,” Ben says carefully. “You could see him. If you wanted.”

Klaus stabs at a piece of chicken with a chopstick for something to do besides answer.

Diego was, in principle, correct. Conjuring Dave would be infinitely easier than Conjuring Dad. Klaus has to make a strenuous effort _not_ to dwell on Dave’s face, imagine his voice, reach out for his soul with metaphysical grabby hands. Dave’s been dead fifty years, and he deserves to rest, but, “I just wish I’d gotten to say goodbye,” Klaus says into his takeout box.

“You still can,” Ben says, “as soon as you’re sober.”

“About that.” Klaus reaches down to pull a baggie of pills out from behind his bed.  

Ben gives him an _are you shitting me_ glare. “Why?”

“Um, extreme emotional fragility?”

“Dude.”

“What?” Klaus says. “You couldn’t honestly think I’d be able to get sober _now_.”

“You’ve done it before.”

“Things were different.” Klaus could sooner strip naked in a snowstorm than get sober under present circumstances.

“You could do it.”

Klaus smiles humorlessly. “Didn’t you hear Diego? I’m too w—”

“Shut up.” Ben flickers in and out of focus as he moves to kneel right in front of Klaus. “Fuck your self-pity. You rallied a room full of ghosts to outsmart two time-traveling assassins. You fought a fucking war. You fell in love. Tell me all that shit wasn’t way more terrifying than getting clean.”

A noodle slips off Klaus’s chopsticks as he gapes at Ben.

“You can do this,” Ben says, hovering a hand right over Klaus’s knee. So close he’d be touching, if he could. “Diego’s an idiot. You’re so much braver than you believe.”

Klaus’s jaw works for a moment before he can get out, “Stronger than I seem? Smarter than I think?”

Ben rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t tell Klaus to fuck off for turning everything into a joke. “That last one might be a stretch,” he says.

Remarkably, Klaus finds himself with a small, but genuine smile on his face. He reaches out to hold his hand over Ben’s.

Call him crazy, but Klaus swears he can almost feel it.

 

Klaus’s agenda of doing nothing but lie around and feel sick for the next several days is rudely interrupted by Luther’s announcement that the apocalypse is nigh.

As family meetings go, Klaus would rank this one above the last, if only for the fact that no one is asking him to dial up their dead father. No one is asking Klaus to do much of anything at all, which is fine by him, because Klaus’s stomach is busy trying to turn itself inside out.

Klaus can practically feel his last functioning brain cell filing its resignation when Luther brings up the moon _again_ , and Five theatrically enters stage-right from another dimension _again_. He curls up on the couch to wait out his siblings’ bickering.

Klaus truly has no fucks left to give. Apocalypse is coming? Fine. Klaus’s top priority is talking to a dead person anyway, and quite frankly, he’s not super fond of having a body at the moment.

Diego tries to rally Klaus into accompanying them to…some unclear destination, but Klaus waves him off. Normally, he’d jump all over that kind of invitation. Right now, nature calls. Urgently.

 

“I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying.”

For better or worse, Ben is correct. Klaus is not dying. He’s driven through this particular dark tunnel too many times to hope a peaceful death is the light on the other side.

“I hate this.”

“At least you’re not locked in a closet this time.”

True, but the motel closet did have one perk that Klaus’s childhood bedroom does not: no space for temptation. And Klaus is sorely tempted, especially now he’s sharing his room with a ghost sporting bloodied craters where his eyes should be.

Klaus wishes he’d go away, or at least cut out his horrible moaning. While the ghost’s grievances are clearly valid, these are not the kinds of sights and sounds Klaus needs to be subjected to while his stomach is so temperamental.

Klaus grips his hair and curls into a tighter ball. Ben makes soft hushing noises. A quiet, unbidden whimper escapes Klaus.

“You need help,” Ben says.

Sure, Klaus will just go check himself into rehab right now. “Everyone’s gone.”

“Luther’s downstairs.”

The absurdity of it surprises a laugh out of Klaus. “What’s Luther gonna do? Scold me into being sober?”

“Actually,” Ben says, “I have a different idea.”

 

Ben’s idea is even more of a disaster than Klaus expected—and let it be known that Klaus had very, very low expectations.

The worst that could happen, Klaus figured, is that Luther would refuse to help. Maybe say something characteristically cutting that would send Klaus reaching for a bottle.

The actual worst-case scenario involves a lot more strangling.

The real flaw in Ben’s plan, in retrospect, was that it was designed with a brother like Diego in mind: Someone who looks on Klaus with disdain, but never full-on disgust. Who can so fundamentally misunderstand Klaus that he makes Klaus want to cry sometimes, but can ultimately be trusted to kick the ass of anyone who tried to hurt him.

Luther is not Diego.

Ben wasn’t there, all those months that Luther and Klaus were the last two left at the Academy. He wasn’t in Dad’s office with Luther and Allison, or in the van with Luther and Five. Ben couldn’t have anticipated that approaching a Luther stripped of his inhibitions would conclude with Klaus hitting the floor for the second time in as many minutes, with Luther’s idiotic “I want to be Number Four” comment rattling around in his head.

Klaus, on the other hand, should have known better.

“Fuck. Are you okay?” Ben is kneeling beside Klaus, hands hovering.

Klaus sits up and rubs the backs of his elbows. “Still not as bad as Five teleporting away from me mid-sentence,” he says.

Someday he’ll stick the landing of a heart-to-heart.

“Klaus.” Ben is incredulous. “Luther shouldn’t have laid a hand on you.”

“Yeah? Tell that to an entire childhood of sparring.”

“That’s different,” Ben says. “You get that, right?”

Yeah, Klaus gets that. He’s just trying not to examine the implications too carefully. He shrugs.

Silence. “You know we have to go after him, right?” Ben says, sounding less than enthused.

“Because it’s the right thing to do?” Klaus says.

“That,” Ben says, “and you’re better at staying out of trouble when you have a project.”

Klaus rubs his eyes. He isn’t really looking to get the shit beaten out of him again. But wrangling Luther still sounds more appealing than pacing the house alone, scratching his arms and crying over Dave.

“I can do this,” Klaus says, trying to psych himself up into standing.

“You can do this,” Ben agrees.

Klaus heaves a sigh and pushes himself off the floor, holding two certain facts to his chest like a security blanket. First, that going after Luther can’t possibly make him feel any worse than he does right now. Second, that it won’t kill him to fixate on something besides temptation to relapse for a teensy while longer.

 

Klaus is wrong on both counts.

Is his life one horrible, extended prank? Now that Klaus has met God, that’s not even a rhetorical question.

Okay, Klaus doesn’t know whether he genuinely believes he died and went to heaven (only to be promptly evicted). He might have just undergone an extremely intense Conjuring.

If so, this was no normal Conjuring. From the moment Klaus awoke in the middle of that country lane, amidst strange accordion muzak playing from somewhere unknown, he was graced with an incredible feeling of peace. This unnatural sense of security was surely the only thing that kept Klaus from breaking down in tears when he sprinted into a shack expecting Dave and wound up in a barbershop with Dad instead (not cool, God).

All right, Klaus may have cried a little at the end there, but it could have been worse. Way, way worse.

The weight of whatever the fuck Klaus just experienced doesn’t hit him until he’s lurching upright on the sticky floor of a club, surrounded by strangers. His brain is still buffering in its attempt to process the past half hour as he staggers home—unable, yet again, to answer Ben’s urgent inquiries about what happened.

Klaus does finally relay his brief excursion into the afterlife around three in the morning. Seeing Ben’s appalled expression does something to soothe Klaus, as though Ben is siphoning away some of his own shock.

Klaus doesn’t sleep at all. He goes downstairs to make coffee sometime around four, and then more coffee, and then more.

Five cups in, Klaus is bouncing on the balls of his feet and tapping a spatula against his chin. “If you think about it, this was actually a good thing,” he says, more to himself than Ben, who’s eyeing him warily from the kitchen table. “I Conjured Dad, just like Luther wanted, and I didn’t even have to try.” Klaus giggles at the serendipity of it.

“You _died_ ,” Ben reminds him, with an expression that says _have some self-respect_.

Ben probably thinks Klaus is in some sort of delayed state of shock. He may well be right, but more importantly, “I have valuable information now.” Klaus gasps. “I could call a family meeting.” He’s never gotten to do that before.

“It’s not even seven,” Ben says.

Klaus waves his spatula dismissively and waltzes off in search of his siblings.

He only manages to find two, but if Klaus had to pick two, Luther and Five would be it. He’s practically vibrating as he pours coffee for each of them. There’s a slight possibility that Klaus may have ingested too much caffeine. A slightly greater possibility he’s too used to taking his caffeine with liqueur. But most of all, despite having been dead as a doornail mere hours ago, Klaus is in a good mood.

 _Make Luther or Five proud_. Klaus is about to check off the first item on his motel closet bucket list.

No one could ever accuse Klaus of being overly optimistic, but after expending so much effort to accomplish so little for his family, he finally has something to bring to the table.

Today, what Klaus has to say actually matters.

Or it would, if either Luther or Five believed him. No jaws drop when Klaus drops the truth bomb about Dad’s suicide. Luther is all scornful disbelief, and he stands up to leave. Five stays seated, but frowns like he’s trying to figure out what Klaus’s game is.

Neither one comes around until Pogo backs him up.

Pogo, who apparently helped their father commit suicide.

Pogo, who’s been sitting on that crucial tidbit all week.

Pogo, who, despite both of those things, is apparently still more believable than Klaus.

Luther storms out, and Five teleports away, and Klaus is left alone in the kitchen with Ben, marveling at how much worse this feels than being kicked out of the van.

Ben slumps back in his chair with a sigh.

 _Same_ , Klaus thinks. “I hate this family.”

 

Klaus didn’t mean that. He didn’t mean it. He takes it back, just please, please, please don’t let Allison die.

Luther is all but yelling at Five to floor it. Five is already flooring it, but he’s not threatening anyone with cigarette lighter burns now. He doesn’t break his dead-silent death stare out the windshield the entire ride.

Klaus, meanwhile, can’t tear his eyes off Allison. He’s twisted around in the passenger seat, terrified that at any moment, a translucent version of his sister is going to peel itself out of her body.

Oh, God, please not again. Klaus can’t lose anyone else. He can’t watch his brothers lose anyone else. Please, Allison, hang on—

“Breathe,” says Ben, folded up on the console between Klaus and Five.

Klaus’s inhale is wet with the threat of tears.

Diego, crammed into the backseat with Allison’s legs over his lap, glances up at the noise. Briefly, one of his gloved hands comes to rest on Klaus’s, where it’s curled over the backseat. Before Klaus can do more than blink in surprise, the hand is gone.

Klaus curls his fingers into fists to resist reaching for it back.

“Breathe,” Ben reminds him again, and Klaus inhales, quieter this time.

 

Klaus holds it together just long enough to watch Mom stick a needle in Diego.

He has to get out of here. Klaus can’t look at his sister’s body without imagining her phantom joining the pair of ghosts in the corner, her neck wound yawning wide without Luther’s massive paw to hold it shut. Klaus can’t sit here and wait for the universe to decide whether Allison is going to pull through. He can’t watch her go, the way he watched Ben and Dave.

Luther and Five stand still and silent over their unconscious siblings. Klaus is shaking. The air in the room is too thick to breathe. He opens his mouth to inhale, and Luther looks over sharply—clearly taking the prologue to Klaus’s panic attack as a gasp at Allison’s ghost. Klaus shakes his head minutely. False alarm. Luther scowls and trains his eyes back on Allison.

Klaus books it upstairs.

“Don’t do it,” Ben says, over Klaus’s feral rummaging for something, anything.

If there were ever a time that Klaus was in the mood for his hallucination to play angel-on-the-shoulder, this is not it. “Just go away. Go away, please.”

Loved ones dropping like flies is a perfectly valid reason to get high. Klaus doesn’t need the uptight part of his brain shaming him for it. He already feels somewhat less than human, desperately ripping open the belly of a stuffed animal in search of relief.

“I like the sober you.”

Is he still talking? “Sobriety’s overrated,” Klaus mumbles, trying not to draw mental parallels between the split-open plushie on his lap and Allison, who must have been so, so frightened, lying all alone as she drowned in her own blood—

“Look where it’s gotten you.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“Where has it gotten me?” Klaus snaps. “Nowhere! I can’t talk to the person I love. People still don’t take me seriously.” _Allison might die._ Klaus can’t force that last part out. “I want to be numb again.”

Klaus looks pleadingly up at Ben from his knees, searching his face for the softened understanding that allowed Klaus to get away with a bath yesterday.

It doesn’t come. “You’re a colossal wimp.”

Klaus scoffs. Hell of a moment for his conscience to try out tough love.

“Life isn’t supposed to be easy. Bad things happen. Good people die.”

The words don’t hurt as much as they otherwise would, because Klaus has just found what he’s looking for.

“Playing the dead card again?” he says, almost on autopilot as he shakes the saving grace of a few stowaway opiates into his palm. “You need new material.”

“I was talking about Dave.”

Klaus very determinedly does not look up.

He’s felt a great many things toward his hallucination over the years: frustrated, saddened, surprised, contrite. Never furious.

Right now, Klaus is furious. Angry enough to hit Ben, if he could. How _dare_ Ben use Dave against him? Klaus wants this shit out of his head _now_.

“I’m tired of seeing you wallow in self-defeat.”

“Well then avert your gaze.”

Klaus is done. He’s _done_.

“You’re better than that. And Dave? He knew it, too.”

Klaus is painfully aware that he’s letting down Dave, and Allison, and the memory of Ben, too. For these reasons, Klaus legitimately is sorry when he says, “You’re right. Sorry.”

This does not stop Klaus yelling “Psych!” as soon as Ben turns away, because it’s the closest he can get to punching someone who doesn’t exist.

For not the first, nor the second, nor even third time today, Klaus’s implicit assumption turns out to be deeply, profoundly incorrect.

The pain of Ben’s fist colliding with Klaus’s jaw barely registers amidst the overwhelming shock of it. Klaus’s hand automatically finds his cheek and he gawks at Ben, who, in turn, gawks at his own hands. One of which just _socked Klaus in the face_. And didn’t go through him. Holy shit.

Ben lifts his eyes to Klaus. For once, he looks just as panic-stricken as Klaus feels. The question written all over Ben’s face is the same one running circles around Klaus’s mind: _Did that really just happen?_

Klaus reaches out, breathless with wonder, but stops up short of his brother’s chest, petrified that his hand will pass through.

From behind the hand cupped over his mouth, Klaus whispers, “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t,” Ben says, more uncertain than Klaus has ever seen him. “You did. I think.”

Heart hammering, Klaus reaches out with trembling fingers toward Ben, who stands perfectly motionless. They both watch with equal fascination as Klaus’s fingertips approach the translucent boundary of Ben’s chest…

…and sink right through.

Klaus yanks his hand back to his chest with a whimper.

“Klaus,” Ben says, in his familiar _don’t panic_ tone.

No no no. Klaus trips in his rush over to his mirror. He angles his face to get a good look at his left cheek. Klaus’s skin is definitely mottled red, especially where the chain of Ben’s knuckles dug into his cheekbone.

He didn’t imagine it. Something physical hit him. Klaus could imagine a punch, but he couldn’t hallucinate his way into blooming a bruise. _Something real hit him._

Klaus turns back to Ben, breaths coming dangerously rapid now. Ben is still holding his hands up, now in a placating, palms-out gesture. “Klaus.”

“You—I—how—” Klaus points dumbly to his own face. _Breathe._ In, out. In, out. “You hit me.”

“Yes,” Ben agrees, without an iota of regret.

The hand that isn’t cupped over Klaus’s face comes up to rub absently over his chest, where his heartbeat feels like an anxious bird flitting around its cage. “That was real,” Klaus says.

“Yes,” Ben says again, softly.

Klaus continues rubbing his chest, staring at Ben. Realization looms, along with the terror that Klaus may be about to revise thirteen years of memories.

“You.” Klaus swallows, and takes a step toward Ben. “That… that was real. You’re.” Oh, shit. Here come the waterworks. But Klaus doesn’t let himself break until he can get out what he means to say: “You’re real.”

Ben takes two strides to close the distance between them. “Newsflash, asshole,” he says gently, “I’ve been real this whole time.”

 _“No more memes for you,”_ is what Klaus would say, if words were an option. Alas.

One of Klaus’s hands clamps over his mouth, and then the other covers that. He’s crying in earnest now, and sinking to his knees. Ben follows Klaus down to the floor where he huddles in a pitiful slump, overwhelmed by the weight of realization. Ben brings a hand up to hover over his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Ben says. “You’re okay, Klaus.”

Klaus nods. He knows he’s going to be okay. He’s just—he just needs a moment to process this exiting-Plato’s-Cave-level epiphany he’s having.

Ben is real. His brother is right here. Not Klaus’s projection of him, or memory of him, or platonic ideal of him, but Ben.

The same Ben who let Klaus paint his toenails when he ran out of his own nails to decorate, and listened to Klaus ramble on about fashion, and held onto Klaus’s elbow when anxiety got the better of him going into battle.

Ben has been with Klaus through rehab and relapse, horrible relationships and worse breakups, literal torture and the aftermath of Dave’s death. Ben’s been here this whole time. Klaus was never alone, after all.

“You’re real.” The words are garbled by tears, muffled by Klaus’s hands, but he needs to say them again, until they feel true.

“I’m real, and I’m not going anywhere.”

That does something weird and warm to the pit of Klaus’s stomach, and draws more tears.

The real Ben has watched Klaus carpet-bomb his neurons with amphetamines, dig through trash, vomit on himself. He read aloud to Klaus while he hid under his bed in rehab, and talked him down from a panic attack in the motel closet. He’s seen Klaus wake up from nightmares and sink into ghost-banishing highs.

Ben has been babysitting Klaus for his entire adult life. He’s seen more of Klaus than anyone else in the world, in all his gruesome, fumbling, irreverent detail, and Ben has never once walked out.

Klaus doesn’t understand how someone could do that. Could keep doing that for Klaus, when all he ever does is inevitably fuck up. People leave Klaus, or they make him leave. That’s the way of the world. “I’m not going anywhere” sounds impossible, except Ben hasn’t gone anywhere, in all this time.

Klaus doesn’t understand. “How could you stay?” he says, voice breaking on the last word.

Ben doesn’t even have to think about it. “You would have stayed for me.”

 

“I owe you, like, a thousand trips to the beach, huh?”

“If you’re counting one for every time I’ve stopped you from doing something monumentally stupid, then that’s thousands, plural.”

Klaus grins. He and Ben are sitting in their usual spots on Klaus’s bed, and Klaus cannot stop staring.

Now that he knows Ben’s ghost is real, it’s like Klaus is truly seeing his brother for the first time since he died. Klaus has to sit on his hands to keep from reaching out for a hug he knows he can’t have.

“I’m sorry,” Klaus says. Again.

Klaus has been Ben’s only living company for over a decade, and rather shitty company, at that. Not once has Klaus seriously considered that Ben could be a real person with his own independent thoughts and feelings. Klaus must have made Ben feel as small and stuck and alone as Klaus has his entire life.

Ben is much better at putting on a brave face than Klaus is. See: right now.

“I know,” Ben says. “I get why you didn’t believe me, when I look like this instead of… that.”

Ben side-eyes the ghost lounging on Klaus’s desk chair. Klaus isn’t thrilled to have an audience, but the ghost is missing most of his head, so it’s unclear how much he can overhear.

“I still don’t understand _why_ ,” Klaus says. He wrenches his eyes away from the gore at his desk to frown at Ben, whose healthy visage—while greatly appreciated—remains the single greatest plot hole in Klaus’s life.

Ben hesitates. “I might have a theory on that.”

Klaus sits up straighter. “You do?”

“Maybe,” Ben says. “Off the top of my head.”

“There are no bad ideas in brainstorming,” Klaus says solemnly.

“I think you’re doing it,” Ben says. “Making me look like this.”

Klaus begins to protest that he most certainly is not, but Ben talks over him. “I don’t know how, and I’m not saying you do, either. But dude. You just let me punch you in the face, and we have no idea how you did that, either.”

“So, what?” Klaus says. “You think I’m unconsciously controlling how you look?”

“I’m saying, there’s clearly more to your power than you consciously understand,” Ben says. “Also, that ghosts don’t actually have bodies. If you get to decide when we have physical forms, is it much of a stretch to think you decide how we look?”

Klaus is vaguely reminded of a guy he dated in his early twenties, who got all starry-eyed while stoned and liked to discuss NOVA specials he’d watched. He once tried to give Klaus the Sparknotes version of an hour-long documentary on quantum mechanics, about how things exist in multiple forms until someone observes them, or something.

Klaus’s head hurts just as much now as it did then, trying to wrap his brain around the notion. “I feel like…you’re giving me too much credit,” he says at last.

“Put away the self-loathing puppy eyes,” Ben says. “I’m serious.”

So is Klaus, but he tries to do as he’s told. “It’s an interesting theory,” Klaus allows, “but it’s not like we can test it.”

Ben tilts his head to the side. “Why not?”

Klaus stares at him incredulously. “I’m not going to _try_ to make you look—” Klaus makes an expansive gesture meant to illustrate blood spurts.

“That is not at all what I meant,” Ben says, unimpressed. “I mean, if you’re controlling what I look like, then maybe you can control how the others look, too. Maybe you could reset your default to seeing them as they were in life, or even—”

Klaus narrows his eyes. “Or even?”

Ben, looking preemptively regretful for getting Klaus’s hopes up, says, “Or even choose whether you see them at all.”

 

Allison is going to pull through.

Harold Jenkins is gruesomely, spectacularly dead.

The apocalypse is officially canceled.

Now, Klaus faces the perhaps even more daunting task of figuring out how to keep living beyond the next twenty-four hours.

Klaus is sitting in the backseat of the car on the way back to the Academy, turning over the last twelve hours in his mind. He doesn’t know what to think, re: Ben’s theory that Klaus has some latent control over ghosts. If he dwells on the notion long enough for his brain to stray from ‘what a wild idea’ to ‘what if it’s true,’ Klaus’s stomach flip-flops in excitement.

Klaus does not want to be excited. There’s not a single shred of evidence to suggest that sober-Klaus can make ghosts disappear, except—

_“You only scratched the surface of what you were truly capable of.”_

Is it possible that Klaus has always had the power to pull ghosts closer or push them away? Possible that this is a psychic muscle he’s allowed to atrophy, because he didn’t know it existed in the first place? Possible that last night, he had some sort of mom-lifting-a-car-off-her-kid superpower moment that allowed Ben to touch him briefly? Possible that if Klaus only practiced—

Ah, see, there’s that delighted squirmy feeling again, completely premature. Klaus still doesn’t know for sure that what happened with Ben wasn’t a total fluke.

Even so. Klaus’s brain won’t give it a rest with the _what if, what if, what if_.

As far as Klaus knows, Five is the only one who’s ever uncovered or spontaneously developed a new dimension to his powers. He would be the ideal person to offer help if he weren’t, you know, Five.

As it is, Klaus might as well ask the advice of Five’s portrait, for all the answers he gets out of his brother.

Five skulks off for a drink, and Klaus is sorely tempted to follow, but, “Klaus.”

Ben’s voice startles Klaus out of his middle-distance stare. Ben is looking down at Klaus’s hands, clasped together against Klaus’s chest.

“Come on,” Ben says, jerking his head toward the staircase. “Let’s see if you’re powerful enough to let a dead man punch you again.”

Klaus raises an eyebrow. “Maybe this time I’ll get to punch you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Ben says, dead serious.

Klaus grins, despite himself. With one final glance over his shoulder after Five, Klaus follows Ben up to his room.

 

“I dunno why I let Luther and Five bother me so much,” Klaus says, apropos of nothing.

He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Ben, where they’ve been trying to play Miss Mac for nearly an hour. Apparently, one episode of psychic hysterical strength does not a new superpower make.

Klaus really is starting to think the incident with Ben was some kind of freak accident that he’ll never be able to replicate, which reminds him that even Five’s time-hopping was a one-off that look him nearly fifty years to repeat, which brings Klaus’s train of thought back around to Five—and another brother who refuses to give Klaus the time of day.

“You want to be taken seriously,” Ben says, matter of fact, like that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for Klaus to want.

Klaus knows he hasn’t done a lot in his life to inspire respect, but, “Every time I think I’ve finally done something worthwhile, it’s never good enough.” Klaus wraps his arms around his stomach and gives a one-shoulder shrug. “I know it never will be, so it’s stupid to keep trying.”

“You’re not stupid,” Ben says. “You hate disappointing people.”

“Excuse you, I’ve spent my whole life disappointing people,” Klaus says.

“And you’ve literally said the phrase ‘I hate my life’ to me twice _today_.”

Touché. “Still feels like I should be used to it by now,” Klaus grumbles.

Ben is wearing the odd expression of someone who finds himself in the position of having to break bad news that he thought was common knowledge already.

“What?” Klaus says.

Ben leans forward to rest his elbows on his thighs and pins Klaus with a penetrating gaze. “Dad spent years locking you in a prison of your literal worst nightmares, because he was disappointed that you couldn’t control your powers.”

Klaus waits for Ben to tell him something he doesn’t know.

“Maybe ‘hate’ was the wrong word,” Ben says. “Afraid. You are very, very afraid of disappointing people.”

Klaus curls forward, forearms digging deeper into his stomach. “I know Luther and Five aren’t Dad,” he mutters, even as his memory starts threading parallels.

Five shouting at Klaus, dazed with grief, for destroying the suitcase.

Luther’s hand around Klaus’s throat for refusing to pull a Conjuring.

“I know you do,” Ben says patiently. “But real talk? Dad did a number on you. On all of us, obviously, but.” Ben shakes his head. “The day I came back, and you said Dad had locked you up hundreds of times.” Ben’s hands curl into fists. “I never wanted to hurt anyone that bad. Alive or dead.”

Klaus stares. He’s rewound and pressed play on that particular memory so many times, but not since the revelation that the real Ben was actually there.

“I mean this in the kindest way possible,” Ben says, giving Klaus an intangible pat on the arm, “but Dad really fucked you up. What he did to you would have fucked anyone up. I know you’re not used to processing this shit sober, but now that you are, you gotta have a little patience with yourself.”

Even Ben’s comfort feels different, knowing it comes from the real deal, rather than some icky, self-indulgent part of Klaus letting the rest of him off the hook.

Klaus swallows around the tight, stinging sensation in his throat, and nods. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

“Any time,” Ben says, and Klaus believes him.

 

Now that Klaus’s mind has started drawing comparisons between Luther and Dad, it’s on a roll.

The cold calm on Luther’s face and in his voice as they watch Vanya sob and bang on the glass is so quintessential Reginald Hargreeves, it’s almost uncanny.

Klaus can’t hear Vanya’s voice behind the window, but he knows it probably sounds something like—

_“Please—please, let me out—please, I’ll be good—don’t leave me—”_

Klaus wrenches himself out of that quicksand flashback before he can sink too deep. Fuck this. Klaus is the one on the other side of the locked door now, and he can’t let this stand.

He can’t break free of the bruising grip that Luther closes around his wrist, either, when Klaus reaches for the hatch.

Diego isn’t stupid enough to try something, even though he looks nearly as disturbed as Klaus. Klaus wants to yell, shove Diego in the chest. After a lifetime of fighting, he’s going to yield to Luther on _this_?

But when Luther blocks even Allison from shouldering past, Klaus realizes Diego might have made the right call.

Behind Luther’s broad shoulders, Vanya’s silent screaming continues. Her hands must hurt. Klaus remembers how the fan of finger bones in his own hands would ache after hours of—

_“Please, Dad—come back—please, let me out, please—”_

“Klaus.” Ben’s voice, pulling him back to the present.

In the present, Klaus’s breathing is fast and shallow, and he feels sort of light-headed. He blinks Ben into focus and tries to get enough air in his lungs to say his brother’s name.

“Come on,” Ben says. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Klaus cuts a look over at Vanya’s open-mouthed devastation. He can’t leave her, he _can’t_. But Ben is firm.

“Klaus. Come on.”

Klaus, who’s having trouble thinking straight due to the lack of oxygen and the _please please please_ on repeat in his head, staggers after Ben’s voice out of the room.

 

“We’re not leaving her in there,” Klaus says, as soon as he’s capable of speech.

“Of course we’re not,” Ben says, as collected as Klaus is flustered.

Klaus frowns. “Then—”

“How were you going to help Vanya with Luther in there?” Ben says, crossing his arms. “While hyperventilating yourself into unconsciousness?”

Klaus’s mouth snaps shut. He drops his eyes. “Thanks,” he murmurs.

Klaus doesn’t say thank you often enough, for Ben helping him find his footing.

Not _nearly_ enough, Klaus realizes, when Ben’s “you’re welcome” comes with a somewhat bemused expression.

Klaus begins to pace his bedroom, still low-key freaking out. He can’t shake the image of Vanya’s agonized expression, or Ben’s words from this afternoon.

_What he did to you would have fucked anyone up._

And now they’ve done it to Vanya. This is insane.

“She needs us,” Klaus says. He knows he’s choir-preaching, but he can’t help it. “We have to get her out.”

“As soon as Luther leaves.”

“You don’t think he’ll keep watch?” Klaus says.

“I think he’ll keep watch over Allison,” Ben says, “and he’s not going to make her stay down there, in her condition.”

Klaus nods. Waiting patiently has never been his forte, but for this, Klaus will make himself sit still. Metaphorically speaking. Klaus has to keep pacing so he doesn’t cry or put his fist through something.

“What about after we get her out?” Klaus says, picking at his nails. “Luther…”

The memory of Luther’s fist around his wrist, around his throat, is all too fresh.

“Diego and Allison will back us up,” Ben says with confidence.

Klaus will have to take Ben’s word for it. His own faith in their siblings is on some seriously shaky ground after the last few days, but it’s not like they have much of a choice. Whatever comes after, they have to get Vanya out.

Klaus has failed one sibling after another all week, but Vanya cannot afford for Klaus to fuck this up.

 

By the time Klaus creeps back downstairs, Vanya has given up calling for help.

She’s sitting on the floor, forehead pressed against the door of her holding chamber. Her eyes are closed when Klaus enters, but as soon as his shadow falls over her, Vanya blinks up at him. First in confusion, then in shock, then in raw, tearful desperation that makes Klaus’s own eyes sting.

“It’s okay,” Klaus whispers. He presses his hand to the glass. “We’re gonna get you out of here.”

_You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out. You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out._

Vanya plants her own hand on the other side of the glass, across from Klaus’s.

“Klaus,” Ben says, watching the door.

“On it.” Klaus reluctantly withdraws his hand to grasp the hatch.

It won’t budge.

Klaus tries harder.

Nothing.

Vanya is standing up now, hands splayed on the glass, eyes wide with fear.

“Klaus,” Ben says.

“I’m trying,” Klaus snaps.

“Put your back into it.”

Klaus is putting his whole body into it, to no effect whatsoever.

He should have known, after a whole childhood of soaking jam jars under scalding water to loosen their lids, that Klaus didn’t have a hope of opening something Luther screwed shut.

Vanya is pacing on the other side of the door, tugging anxiously at her sleeves.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Klaus says, mostly to himself, as he rubs his stinging hands against the legs of his pants. “It’s gonna be okay.”

_You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out. You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out._

Klaus grabs hold of the hatch and tries again, with no more success.

“Maybe we should get Diego,” Ben says, throwing his gaze back and forth between Klaus and the door through which Luther might enter any moment.

Diego. Couldn’t have thought of that before they came down here?

Klaus looks up to tell Vanya to stay calm, he’ll be right back. To his surprise, Vanya has both hands pressed against the glass again and staring down the hatch with Five-like intensity.

Klaus waves his hands to get her attention. Vanya looks up at him, and very deliberately nods at the hatch: _Go again_.

Klaus’s face twists into an apologetic expression and he shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says, voice shaking. Why is he always so _useless_ —

No. Shut up. Now is not the time.

Vanya nods more insistently at the hatch.

What is Klaus to do, but to shake out his arms and try one more time?

Slowly, oh so slowly, the hatch turns.

What the actual fuck.

Klaus looks up in awestruck excitement at Vanya, but she’s not looking at him. She’s still staring down at the hatch, with eyes that have gone eerily white.

Klaus nearly loses his grip. “Ben,” he whispers.

“Yes, I’m seeing this too,” Ben says.

Before Klaus can get out another confused word, the door swings open, Vanya tumbles out, and Klaus ends up with an armful of sobbing sister.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Klaus is being hugged.

Holy shit, Klaus is being hugged.

 _Hug back, you idiot_.

Klaus does.

He helped. Klaus helped someone.

Holy shit, Klaus helped someone and he’s being hugged.

“Don’t make me go back in.”

Klaus’s heart twists. He looks helplessly up at Ben, who’s absolutely no use, because he’s too busy looking down at their sister with his own heartbroken expression. Klaus, left to his own devices, carefully runs his hand down Vanya’s hair. “You’re not going back. You don’t ever have to go back.”

Klaus has never been entrusted with so much vulnerability from another person. Ever. He has no idea how to proceed.

“Ben,” he says, because Ben is so, so much better at this than he is.

“Klaus!”

Not Ben.

Klaus turns on his heel and tucks Vanya behind his back. Luther is standing in the doorway, with Diego, Allison and Five rushing down the hall after him.

That desire to _hurt_ , which Klaus only saw truly untamed for the first time when Luther was drunk, is back on his brother’s face now, just as wild as it was then.

“Luther—” Klaus says, lifting up placating hands.

“What the fuck are you doing? Get away from her!”

“Wait a minute—” Diego says, at the same time Klaus says, “Just listen—”

Luther does not. He storms forward, hand out to grab Klaus.

Klaus’s stomach twists and his own hand automatically comes up to cover his neck. No, no, no, “Luther, please—”

“Stop!”

This from Ben, who plants himself in front of Klaus, as if to block Luther’s path.

For a fleeting moment, Klaus is overwhelmed with a surge of affection for his brother, so stupidly self-sacrificing, even when he doesn’t have a physical self to put on the line.

A second later, Klaus’s endearment is completely overshadowed by utter bewilderment, because Luther stops.

Luther stops, and he’s staring at Ben.

Not through him, at him.

Much of the color has left Luther’s face, and his mouth is hanging open. He looks, if Klaus didn’t know any better, like he’s seen a ghost.

But that’s not—

But it is.

“Ben?”

Not Luther. Diego. Hovering uncertainly at the door, squinting at Ben through the gloom in total confusion.

Allison, beside him, holds her notebook to her chest with one hand and covers her mouth with the other.

“Ben,” Luther says, and takes a steadying step backward, as though the sight of Ben has literally thrown his world off balance.

What is happening right now.

“You can see me?” Ben says, sounding just as staggered as Luther.

Three nodding heads. Behind Klaus, Vanya’s grip around the hem of his shirt tightens.

“You can see me,” Ben breathes. “How can you see me?”

Slowly, all eyes in the room turn toward Klaus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof. Ok I think we're p much done with the h part of h/c. Should be all kindsa catharsis here on out. Big thanks to the people who left comments on Pt 2 :D And thank you, always, sevenimpossiblethings for betaing!


	4. Part 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes on bikes, sorry this took a millennium to post. On with the show!

Klaus is starting to suspect that living at home, if he decides to stay, is going to involve more regularly scheduled meetings than rehab.

He’s sitting cross-legged in a chair by the window in the parlor, where Luther called them to order. Klaus is surprised Luther has any Number One weight left to throw around. He pretty quickly conceded to freeing Vanya, when it became clear that literally no one, not even Ben’s ghost, was on board with locking her up.

Klaus can’t recall a time Luther looked more severely shaken than the moment Ben appeared in Vanya’s defense. Although, from what Pogo told Luther about her powers, Klaus imagines Vanya could have held her own, once Luther didn’t have the element of surprise on his side.

Ben, for his part, vanished almost as quickly as he appeared. Klaus was still chasing the sensation of that split second before Ben took physical form, trying to figure out what the fuck he was thinking to make that happen, when Luther gave the unsteady order: “Everyone upstairs. Now.”

With every passing moment, Klaus feels the memory slipping further away.

Vanya is sitting on the sofa between Five—ramrod straight, despite his Mai Tai—and Allison, similarly on guard against Luther. This is such a different brand of tension than Klaus is accustomed to sitting through, with Allison and Luther. He almost misses them making heart-eyes at each other. Almost.

Diego is standing across from Klaus with his arms folded over his chest. Unless Klaus is very much mistaken, Diego has not stopped looking at him since the moment Ben disappeared. Klaus wishes he would cut it out.

Luther looks up at Diego, waiting for him to take a seat. When Diego does not, Luther coughs. “So, um. Obviously, there’s some. You know. Stuff we need to talk about.”

“This is painful,” Ben murmurs.

No kidding.

“A lot we’ve been keeping from each other,” Luther continues lamely.

The words have barely left his mouth before Allison starts scribbling. The notepad she turns around reads, _A LOT DAD KEPT FROM US_.

“Right,” Luther says quickly. He looks around for an ally and, finding none, adds, “In Vanya’s case.” His eyes slide over to Klaus—a considerably easier target than someone who’s currently enjoying the backup of Allison and Five.

Once again, Klaus finds himself in the uncomfortable epicenter of his entire family’s attention. What he wouldn’t give for something to occupy his hands. Preferably a cigarette. As it is, Klaus is left to play with the loose fabric of his harem pants.

Ben puts a hand on the back of Klaus’s chair.

“How long?” Luther says.

Klaus’s hands sure are sweating an awful lot. “Since.” The word is thin and raspy, and Klaus clears his throat to say, “Since we were...eighteen?”

Luther’s dour expression morphs into disbelief. “And you didn’t say anything?” His voice gets stronger as he settles back into the familiarity of frustration with Klaus. “You didn’t think we had the right to know Ben’s been here this whole time?”

“Obviously I would have said something,” Klaus says, stung. He can’t even imagine, if one of the others had been in contact with Ben for years and kept it a secret.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t—”

Klaus stops, damp hands twisting in the fabric of his pants, because he knows exactly how idiotic his excuse is going to sound.

Luther raises his eyebrows: _You didn’t what?_

“I didn’t know he was real,” Klaus finishes weakly.

Confused silence all around.

Luther slices through it with a sharp, “ _What_?”

Klaus flinches.

“All right, no more questions out of you,” Diego says, shoving past Luther to sit in the chair next to Klaus. He leans forward, elbows on his knees. He’s still frowning, but not like he’s angry. Like he’s honestly trying to understand. “What do you mean, Klaus?”

Klaus glances up at Ben, who nods. He looks back at Diego, whose eyes linger on the spot where Ben is standing, before coming back to rest on Klaus.

The last time Diego asked Klaus for this much honesty, he ended up taking a sledgehammer to Klaus’s very fragile feelings. But Klaus doesn’t have much of a choice about fessing up now, does he? Not when six pairs of eyes are pinning him to his seat.

So Klaus tries not to think about the last time. He thinks about Diego barging into his bedroom at seventeen. About Diego rescuing Klaus from the police station, or this club or that. About Diego ordering Klaus to keep a safe distance while he went after Hazel and Cha-Cha.

Apart from Ben, there’s no one in the world Klaus trusts more than Diego. He’s running out of excuses not to trust Diego with this.

Whatever happens, Ben is real, he’s here, and he’s not going anywhere. Klaus can do this. Deep breath. Here we go.

 _Please believe me_.

“Ben doesn’t look like other ghosts,” Klaus says, directing his words at Diego’s chest. “He looks the way he did before he died. All the other ghosts that follow me around look like their corpses. So usually there’s a lot more, uh. Gore. And crying. And yelling at me. Which Ben does not. Unless I’m about to do something stupid.”

Klaus chances a glance up at Diego, who's looking at Klaus not unlike the way Luther looked at Ben. 

“Follow you around.” This from Five, whose head is cocked to the side as he studies Klaus. “I thought you had to Conjure spirits.”

“You can get someone specific with Conjuring,” Klaus says, “but the rest are always there.”

“Always,” Luther says, voice flat and inscrutable. “Yelling at you.”

“Whenever I’m sober,” Klaus amends. In the interest of full disclosure, he adds, “Not all of them yell.”

Diego is still looking at Klaus, but Klaus can’t look back. If he looks back, he might start to cry.

“But Ben isn’t like the others,” Five says. “Why?”

Klaus shrugs helplessly. “No idea.”

“Liar,” Ben interjects, and Klaus gives him a halfhearted scowl.

Diego follows Klaus’s gaze to Ben’s corner. “What?” he says. “What did Ben say?”

Man, life is going to be so much more complicated now that they know, isn’t it.

Klaus sighs. He doesn’t want to say it, but the inertia of his honesty makes it difficult to stop, now he’s gotten started. “Ben thinks I might be subconsciously controlling the way he looks,” he says, the same way he might say Ben believes in Bigfoot or that NASA staged the moon landings. “He has this theory that I just didn’t learn how to control ghosts properly, but maybe…”

If Klaus says this aloud, that will make the hope real and solid, and Klaus won’t be able to ignore it—or the disappointment to follow if it turns out not to be true.

“But?” This question, to Klaus’s surprise, comes from Vanya. Even Vanya seems a little startled that she’s spoken. She looks briefly at Allison, as though retroactively asking permission.

Klaus swallows. Fuck. Dad left behind so much to fix. How are any of them supposed to get through it, without a little hope?

“But he thinks,” Klaus says, directly to Vanya now, “I could still learn.”

 

Diego finds Klaus in the courtyard, blowing smoke at the moon.

Nicotine is the only concession Ben is willing to make to Klaus’s cold-turkey sobriety, and only because today was such an emotional clusterfuck.

Klaus is still struggling to relax into the aftermath of the parlor meeting when he hears Diego’s footfalls approaching from behind.

“Tell Ben I’m sorry about that,” Diego says as he comes to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Klaus, and nods at the wreckage of Ben’s statue.

“He can hear us,” Klaus says, tapping a few specks of orange glow off the end of his cigarette. Just in case Diego does feel bad, Klaus adds, “He never liked it much, anyway.”

“Well,” Ben says contrarily.

Klaus ignores him.

“Right,” Diego says, and falls silent. He’s either trying to figure out how to ride a segue to his desired topic of conversation, or simply wait enough time to raise the subject without preamble.

Either way, Klaus knows where they’re going, and he’s in no hurry to get there. He takes a drag, tilts his head back, and breathes a stream of smoke into the sky.

“You never told me,” Diego says. He sounds sad. And hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Klaus says.

“I don’t want an apology. I want to know why.”

Klaus looks to Ben, but Ben simply brushes his hands together and holds them up, palms out.  _This one's on you_.

Klaus sighs and crouches down to stamp out his cigarette in the anthill-sized heap of Dad’s ash. He stands up and grudgingly meets Diego’s eyes. How to explain.

“You’re a superhero,” Klaus says. “You like to swoop in and rescue people, and that’s great. But with me?” Klaus holds his arms out to his sides. “No villain to slay. No hostages to save. There’s no way to fix me.”

“You’re not broken,” Diego says, quick as a reflex.

Klaus smiles wanly.

“You’re not,” Diego says, in his _fight me_ voice. “You just have a—problem.”

“An unfixable problem,” Klaus says. He gives Diego a pat on the shoulder. Klaus has had a whole lifetime to come to terms with this, after all. Diego needs time.

Diego shrugs Klaus’s hand off. “What about Ben’s idea?”

“Thank you,” Ben says.

Klaus shoots him a look. To Diego, he says, “Look. Learning to control my power sounds great on paper, but I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“How did you train when we were kids?” Diego says.

Something inside Klaus spiderweb-cracks. All he can say is, “No.”

Diego frowns. “No what?”

“No,” Klaus says again, and turns away.

 _Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry_.

“Klaus—” Ben says.

Diego grabs Klaus’s arm. “Wait a minute.”

“Let go,” Klaus says, yanking his arm ineffectively.

“I’m just trying to—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Klaus snaps, whipping around, “and I said _no_. Why can’t you leave it alone?”

“Because I’ve left you alone your whole life!”

Klaus stops pulling away. “What?”

Diego is wearing the self-startled expression of someone who absolutely did not mean to say that, but he quickly blinks it away and sets his jaw. “Even when we were kids, I knew something was wrong. I knew, and I l-left. I watched you poison yourself for years, and n-never bothered to find out why. And now it turns out, that was all to escape walking c-c-corpses harassing you every goddamn moment of the day?”

Diego releases Klaus’s arm to clench his hands into fists at his sides. “I have to f-fix it,” he says expression on the border between determined and desperate.

Klaus’s hands come up to clasp the fabric of his shirt. He locks his knees to keep from wobbling.

Klaus always imagined, if-slash-when he finally gave Diego the low-down on his powers, he would be filled with guilt and regret.

Instead, Klaus is filled with the liquid-warm, slightly numbing relief of handing off something heavy after carrying it a long way.

“You should sit down,” Ben says.

Klaus does. Right here on the damp grass. Seems as good a spot as any.

Diego, with some alarm, follows Klaus down into a crouch. “Klaus?”

“Gimme a minute,” Klaus says, one palm flattened over his quick-beating heart.

“Okay,” Diego says, dragging the word out uncertainly. He shifts to sit beside Klaus.

Klaus immediately slumps sideways to rest his head on Diego’s shoulder, and very nearly starts crying again when Diego lets him.

 

“Dad took me to a mausoleum. For my training. When we were kids.”

Diego does not startle, even though Klaus has just broken several minutes of silence. Klaus has scooted closer in the interim, so that he’s practically curled into Diego’s side. Sue him. It’s chilly out here.

“And do what?” Diego says, voice tight.

Diego is _so_ bad at nonchalance, bless him.

“Lock me in there.”

Diego goes rigid. “Why?”

“Probably because I kept trying to leave,” Klaus says.

“No.” Diego shrugs his shoulder to make Klaus sit up and face him. Klaus does so reluctantly. He just succeeded in making a reliably warm spot for his cheek on the stiff leather of Diego’s jacket.

“Why did he shut you in a mausoleum for training?” Diego says.

“I think it was supposed to be some sort of immersion therapy something-or-other,” Klaus says, reaching back to what little he recalls from the copy of _Psychology for Dummies_ he picked up in the Shinyview ‘library’—which was effectively several bookcases crammed in a storage closet.

“Because you were scared of ghosts,” Diego says woodenly.

“Petrified,” Klaus says. “Presumably, once I mastered the not-being-scared part, I was supposed to learn other things. Couldn’t get past step one, though.” Klaus forces a grin. “Typical, amirite?”

Diego does not return Klaus’s smile. He frowns in that constipated, _get me a punching bag stat_ way of his, and Klaus’s self-deprecating smirk slips.

“When did it start?” Diego says.

Klaus shrugs. “When did any of us start? Four, five?”

“Four or five,” Diego echoes faintly.

“Now you’re getting it,” Ben intones. He’s lying on his back a few feet away, ostensibly stargazing, actually eavesdropping.

Diego, for want of something to punch, curls and uncurls a fist and glares at some indistinct point in the middle distance.

“You okay, buddy?” Klaus says.

Diego ignores him. Klaus will take that as a no. He waits for Diego to say something. Klaus is not usually one to let a silence stand, but Diego appears in the middle of some very intense internal dialogue, which seems rude to interrupt.

“You were gone for hours,” Diego says finally. “When you left for solo training. You were gone for _hours_.”

“Yeah,” Klaus says, plucking a piece of grass and stripping it apart for something to do with his hands.

“And you were just. Locked up. With bloody corpses wailing at you.”

“That's about the size of it,” Klaus says.

Diego breathes heavily through his nose. “What the _fuck_.”

Klaus has no answer. What the fuck indeed.

When Klaus glances over at Ben, he finds Ben watching him with laserlike intensity. In all likelihood, he’s anticipating a panic attack. Klaus takes stock of himself to see whether one is coming.

He thinks not. Which is surprising. Klaus usually can’t think about the mausoleum for this long, let alone talk about it, without at least a little anxious breakdown. Right now, it’s like Diego is literally upset enough for both of them.

“Dad was a total psychopath,” Diego says.

Klaus nods, staring at his father’s little lump of ash.

“I would’ve gone insane,” Diego says, “being locked up like that.”

“I think I would have,” Klaus admits, “if I hadn’t… you know.” He makes a vague gesture with one hand.

“Yeah,” Diego says, “and I called you an idiot.”

“You are fond of doing that,” Klaus agrees.

“I shouldn’t have.”

Klaus quirks an eyebrow.

“I said some terrible shit to you,” Diego says. “The night I broke into your room.”

Klaus’s heart beats heavily in his ears. “You meant well.”

“Still.”

Yeah. Still.

But Klaus doesn’t want Diego to sit here feeling bad about that. Not when so much has changed since. Not when Klaus is so comfy-cozy in the relief that _somebody knows_.

“For the record,” Klaus says, “you never ‘left me alone.’ You’re one of two people in the whole world who never left me.”

Diego makes an unconvinced grunting noise.

“Seriously. You’re the only emergency contact I’ve ever had. You picked me up from rehab. You let me crash on your air mattress. You fed me for most of July 2018.” Klaus puts a hand on Diego’s shoulder. “Believe me when I say, there’s no one—not a living soul—”

“Nice save,” Ben says.

“—that I trust more than you, okay? Whatever terrible shit we said to each other when we were seventeen. Capiche?”

After another solid bout of sulking, Diego nods.

That being settled, Klaus settles himself back on Diego’s shoulder, delighted all over again that Diego will let him.

“We’re gonna figure this out,” Diego says, because he can handle a single moment’s peace about as well as a hot coal.

“What?” Klaus says through a yawn.

“Your training,” Diego says. “Fuck the mausoleum. We’re gonna figure out how to do it right.”

Klaus is not going to cry. He’s made it this far through this conversation without tears. He’s not going to start now.

“So you can have some goddamn peace and quiet, for once,” Diego tacks on.

All right, so Klaus is going to cry. Cool.

In lieu of responding, Klaus turns to tuck his face into the crook of Diego’s neck and loop his arms around Diego’s shoulders in a sideways hug.

Diego gives Klaus a series of stiff pats between the shoulder blades.

It’s extremely awkward and uncomfortable and absolutely perfect.

 

Vanya finds Klaus in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, drinking Chamomile tea that Ben promised over two hours ago would make Klaus drowsy.

Chasing sleep is difficult sober. More so when a crying corpse is following you around. Klaus is pinching the bridge of his nose when the sound of a soft knock makes him look up. Vanya hovers in the doorway, pulling at the cuffs of her sleeves.

“Hey,” Klaus says. When Vanya continues to simply stand there awkwardly, he kicks out the chair across from him in invitation.

Vanya ducks her head and comes to sit.

“Want some of this?” Klaus says, pointing at the teapot. “It tastes like shit, but it’s supposed to be soothing. So Ben says.” Klaus makes a dubious face.

“To be fair, you are basically drinking honey at this point,” Ben says.

“No thanks,” Vanya says. A pause. “Is Ben here?”

Klaus tilts his head to the left to indicate Ben, who gives Vanya an invisible wave. “Pretty much always,” Klaus says.

“Anyone else?”

The woman in the corner heaves an especially heavy sob. “Just one.”

Vanya nods and twists her hands together on the table.

While Klaus waits for her to work herself up to whatever she wants to say, he takes another sip of tea and wrinkles his nose.

“I don’t know whether you ever read my book,” Vanya starts, and then stops.

Klaus’s eyes meet Ben’s. Klaus sets his mug down on the table. “Your description of Dad as a Batman villain knock-off made me laugh.”

Vanya smiles thinly, but it quickly falls away. “About what I wrote about your training.”

Klaus holds his hands up, hello-goodbye outward, because even on the margins of his mind, the memory of that afternoon makes Klaus shift uncomfortably in his seat. “Water under the bridge,” he says.

Vanya looks unconvinced.

Klaus sighs. “I do not say this lightly, but—Luther was right. Whatever Dad kept from us? There's a lot more we kept from each other. You couldn’t have known.”

Also, if Vanya apologizes, then Klaus is going to have...some kind of feeling about that. A feeling that will prove Klaus is still hurting over this, and Klaus is so tired of hurting over it. He has so much else to hurt over, these days.

“Yeah, okay,” Vanya says, and nods.

The gesture has some finality to it, but Vanya doesn’t leave.

Klaus sips his awful tea again to buy a moment to figure out how to have a conversation with Vanya. Chattering aimlessly is Klaus’s _thing_. But something about Vanya, or sobriety, or the exhaustion of having expended all his emotional energy for the next year in a single day leaves Klaus grasping for words.

“So...powers,” Klaus says. “You have those.”

“Well done,” Ben says dryly.

Not Klaus’s best work.

“That’s what they tell me,” Vanya says.

“How does it feel?” Klaus says.

“Overwhelming.” Vanya tucks her hair behind her ear. “Terrifying.”

“Relatable,” Klaus says.

“Except for the part where I killed someone,” Vanya says, tone taking a self-loathing turn that Klaus does not like one bit.

“Which prevented the apocalypse,” Klaus says. “Worse ways to make your superhero debut.”

Vanya’s lips are turned down in a doubtful frown, but she doesn’t contradict him. “Allison thinks I can learn to control it.”

“What _is_ it, exactly?” Klaus says.

Vanya’s laugh is weak. “You know, not even I really know?”

 _Intrigue_ , Klaus thinks, but does not say, because if he doesn’t want other people fetishizing his powers, perhaps he shouldn’t do that to Vanya’s.

“Allison believes you could learn to control it, though,” Klaus says, bringing them back to the point at hand.

“And Five.”

“Then you’re golden,” Klaus says. “You know how Five is when he sinks his teeth into a problem.”

“Yeah,” Vanya says. She reaches up to tuck back hair that is already behind her ear. “What about you?”

“I’m not sure how much help I’d be,” Klaus muses, “but sure, why not?" Not like Klaus has anywhere else to be.

“I meant with your powers.”

“Oh.”

Everyone’s very fixated on that, aren’t they? On the one hand, it’s beyond nice that someone cares enough to ask. On the other, it’s just. A lot of pressure, and—

Here’s the thing. Klaus isn’t faking his optimism that Vanya can learn to properly channel her power, but Klaus is not Vanya. He’s not starting at square one because his power is in mint condition, straight out of the package. Klaus has had thirty years to play around with his own séance skills, to try to make them do what he wants them to, and he’s failed. That must _mean_ something.

Vanya doesn’t need to know all this. She needs someone to tell her that good things are possible without looking like a total hypocrite. Klaus casts around for a response that's honest without being overtly cynical.

“I don’t know if it’ll happen for me,” Klaus says, “but I owe it to Ben to try. Even if nothing changes, it just helps that someone _knows_ now, you know?”

Ben rests his hand on the table next to Klaus’s.

The corner of Vanya’s mouth curls up. “Yeah, it does.”

 

Luther finds Klaus in the bathroom early the next morning, while Klaus is taking Ben up on his recommendation of a bubble bath. No better place to tune out ghosts with Elton John and wait to see if the five Advil tablets Klaus popped are going to do anything for this god-awful headache.

Klaus catches Luther’s profile in the doorway out of the corner of his eye. With a glance at Ben, he tugs his headphones down around his neck. Ben hops down from his perch on the sink.

Luther looks...diminished. It’s partially the shadows under his eyes, partly the fact that his shoulders are pulled forward, as though he’s trying to appear smaller. It’s super weird. If Luther is trying to appear less off-putting, he is not succeeding.

“Can I come in?” Luther says.

“Uh,” Klaus says. Ben’s eyes are narrowed, but he doesn’t object. “Sure?”

Luther shuts the lid of the toilet and sits down. Klaus pulls his toes off the lip of the tub so that his entire body from shoulders-down is obscured by foam.

“I forgot you used to do this,” Luther says, gesturing to the tub. “Does it help with the…” Luther waves a forefinger aimlessly around the room, which Klaus roughly interprets as ‘ghosts.’

“Not as much as other things,” Klaus says, “but yeah. A little.”

Luther hums an affirmative noise, like he’s taking that under advisement.

‘Tiny Dancer’ plays, faint and tinny, against Klaus’s clavicle. He would like very much to go back to enjoying his bath in peace. "Did you want something?" he prompts.

Luther blows out a breath. “I think I owe you an apology.”

“You mean, Allison thinks you owe me an apology,” Klaus guesses.

Luther hesitates. “She suggested it,” he admits, “but she’s right. I was way out of line with Vanya, and with you. Sorry.”

“Oh,” Klaus says, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

If Klaus ever expected Luther to apologize for any part of the past week—and that's a  _strong_ if—the best Klaus would have dared hope for would be a sideways apology. The kind where Luther would say he knew he _should_ apologize, and expect that to count for the actual apologizing. A straightforward ‘sorry’ is about as out of character as Luther’s hunched shoulders, and it’s weirding Klaus out.

Klaus legitimately thinks he might be dreaming when Luther adds, “Not just in the basement. The other afternoon...I was in a really bad place, after finding out why Dad sent me to the moon—”

One of the many great things about having Ben around is that when Klaus looks into the camera like he’s on ‘The Office,’ he actually has someone to look at.

“—but that’s no excuse. I’m supposed to be Number One, and what kind of leader hurts his own team?”

If you ask Klaus, Does Not Choke People is a characteristic that someone should aspire to regardless of their leadership status. Just, you know, as a basic requirement of being a person. But if this is how Luther needs to process his lesson-learned, Klaus will indulge him. He’ll leave the fixer-upper-ing to Allison.

“Thanks for saying that,” Klaus says, because ‘that’s okay’ would be a lie, but he feels like Luther’s apology does warrant some positive reinforcement.

“Tell him that if he ever comes at you like that again, my human form isn’t the only thing that’ll be manifesting,” Ben says with a poison-sweet smile.

“I’m not saying that,” Klaus says.

“What?” Luther says, brow furrowing.

“Ben,” Klaus explains, jerking his head in Ben’s direction. “He might not be totally ready to forgive you yet.” Klaus will leave it at that.

“That’s...fair,” Luther says warily. “You guys are...close, huh?”

This, Klaus can be completely honest about. “I owe him everything.”

 

Klaus would start training right away, but he owes a certain someone several thousand beach trips. Now that the Day of Reckoning has passed sans reckoning, this seems as good a time as any to start clearing his debt. Also, the last two weeks alone have aged Klaus about a thousand years, and he and Ben could both use some sand and sun to recover.

“Why are you telling me this,” Diego says, after Klaus invites himself into Diego’s room to relate his plan.

“Because you’re driving,” Klaus says. “Obviously.”

“What.”

Klaus shrugs. “Or don’t.” He adjusts his beach bag over his shoulder and flips his shades down over his eyes. “See you when we see you.”

“Wait.”

Mmm-hmm. That’s what Klaus thought.

Diego heaves himself out of bed with exaggerated reluctance. “There’s something I have to take care of before I go out in public.”

Klaus raises an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

But Diego is out the bedroom door without another word.

“Diego?” Klaus calls after him. “Diego, what does that mean?”

What it means, explains Five—who Klaus finds in the parlor, cradling the upper half of a mannequin against his hip with one hand and a Manhattan with the other—is that Diego is currently wanted for murder and needs to iron out the legal details of clearing his name.

“Do you get the sense there’s a lot going on that I don’t know about?” Klaus says, as he and Ben watch Five disappear upstairs with the mannequin.

“This week, or in general?” Ben says.

“Ha ha.” Klaus drops his beach bag by the front door and heads for the courtyard. “Might as well practice while we wait.”

Ben brightens. “Try channeling your excitement about the beach.”

Klaus has yet to give Ben his physical form back, but Ben did make one interesting observation this morning that might help.

_“All three times your powers have done something weird, you’ve been terrified,” Ben said. He counted off on his fingers: “Afraid that Dad locked you up for good? I appear, looking completely normal. Afraid Allison’s going to die? I punch you in the face. Afraid Luther’s about to choke you out? Boom. Other people can see me.”_

_“Wow, you’re like the anti-Patronus,” Klaus said._

_“Not necessarily,” Ben said, with more optimism than seemed justified. “Maybe you just have to be in a state of heightened emotion—and that just happens to be fear, most of the time.”_

_Klaus contemplated that. Ben’s theory did make a certain amount of sense. Klaus hadn’t left himself much opportunity for naturally strong feelings, good or bad, all those years he spent strung out. Besides, “Can’t hurt that I know you’re actually there to manifest, now.”_

_“Exactly.”_

_“So, a really intense, positive emotion might trigger it, too.”_

_“Worth a try.”_

They do try, and try, and try.

“Looks like I’m just not superpower-boosting excited about the beach,” Klaus says, propping his chin on the heel of one hand to gaze glumly at Ben’s translucent form.

“We’ll find something else exciting,” Ben says, though his hopeful tone is undercut by the disappointed downturn of his mouth.

Klaus’s stomach twists. After all Ben has done, he deserves for Klaus to give him this. Klaus _has_ to give him this.

“Alternatively,” Klaus says, straightening up, “why fix what ain’t broken? Luther’s upstairs. I bet he’d be down to give me a good sc—”

“ _No_ ,” Ben says, making a face. “What the fuck?”

Klaus frowns. “Why not? We both know my dopamine receptors are shot. Who knows if I’ll ever catch a happy feeling strong enough to make you manifest? Let’s just do what we already know works.”

“No,” Ben says again, in a tone that brooks no argument. “We’re doing this right, or not at all.”

“But what if scaring me _is_ right?” Klaus says. “What if fear is the only way this works?”

“Then we don’t do it,” Ben says.

Klaus scoffs. “Get out of here with your self-sacrificing bullshit.”

“No, _you_ get out of here with your self-sacrificing bullshit,” Ben says, jabbing a finger through Klaus’s chest. “Two hours into trying to feel happy, and you’re ready to give up? Fuck that.” Ben leans back to survey Klaus, expression severe. “I believe you can do this. And you owe me way more than beach trips, so you don’t get to quit until I say you do. Got it?”

Klaus sucks his wobbling lower lip between his teeth. He nods at the grass.

“Good,” Ben says, and gives Klaus a minute to collect himself.

“I don’t get how you can have so much faith in me,” Klaus says, when he’s sure the words will come out steady.

“Someone has to,” Ben says. “You have the self-esteem of a baked potato.”

"Gee, thanks."

Ben gives a  _facts are facts_ shrug. 

Klaus concedes to a smile. “You know you’re like, the wisest, kindest person ever.”

“I know,” Ben says, because he is the wisest. And because he is the kindest, he adds, “It’s nice to hear anyway.”

 

“Our lives have been wall-to-wall family drama since Dad’s funeral,” Klaus says when he is, at long last, buckling himself into Diego’s car for their beach excursion. “Where did you find the time to get framed for murder?”

Diego scowls. “Shut up.”

Oooookay. Klaus touched a serious nerve there. He knows, because Diego has been handling Klaus like he’s got a “fragile” sticker slapped across his forehead ever since their conversation in the courtyard.

“Too soon,” Klaus admits. “Let me start over.” Klaus presses his hands together and angles his fingers toward Diego. “I’m very glad you’re no longer a fugitive.”

Diego’s scowl deepens. “I don’t care about that.”

Klaus sneaks a glance at Ben to gauge whether it’s appropriate to find that a baffling statement. Ben is frowning, which Klaus takes as license to say, “Then I’m confused. What are we upset about?”

Diego fiddles with the rearview mirror. He’s looking into it when he says, “The woman they thought I murdered. I knew her.”

“Oh, shit,” Klaus and Ben say in unison.

“Yeah.”

“Was she...a friend of yours?” Klaus ventures. Does Diego have friends?

“You remember the night I bailed you out?”

Klaus mentally trudges through the foggy swamp of his early-twenties memory, until he arrives at—

_“You’d have to buy coffee every day for a year to pay me back.”_

“The officer,” Klaus breathes.

“Hazel and Cha-Cha murdered her. I found her body in their motel room.”

Several scattered fragments of recollection are converging to form a single, horrifying picture in Klaus’s mind.

_Klaus scooted his aching body, inch by painful inch, toward the door. He was trying to figure out how he might use his teeth or crook of his neck to turn the knob when a silhouette passed the window._

_Klaus’s heart cartwheeled._

_He screamed against his duct tape. Oh god, no, don’t go. Come back, come back—_

_Klaus wailed again, but he’d wasted so much of his voice when he was trapped in that tight coffin of a closet—locked up—still locked up—please—someone, let him out, please—_

_In a fit of desperation, Klaus slammed his head down on the table. And again. And again._

_He was dangerously close to vomiting, now._

_Again and again. Harder, louder. Please, please let someone hear._

_Dizzy, Klaus was so dizzy._

_Again and again._

_Klaus’s ears were ringing. Still, no one came._

_Again and…and again._

_Klaus’s forehead was sticky where it rested on the table._

_Come on, get back up. Again, you idiot._

_But Klaus couldn’t. He couldn’t move. He sobbed._

_The doorknob clicked._

_Through the gloom and his tear-blurred vision, Klaus couldn’t distinguish much of the woman standing over him, besides her gaping mouth. If Klaus’s own mouth weren’t taped shut, they’d be wearing mirror expressions._

_A pitiful, kicked-puppy whimper escaped him, but Klaus didn’t care. Someone found him. Someone came._

_“Are you Diego’s brother?”_

_Diego—Diego tipped someone off. Someone he knew from the force. Klaus nodded quickly, and winced._

_“I’m Detective Patch.”_

_Normally, the pleasure would be all Klaus’s, but. He jerked his head toward the bathroom._

_Patch got the message and cut him free. Klaus shook out his hands to get the blood flowing into his numb fingers again, but he’d barely stood up before Patch shoved him onto the bed. Klaus rolled to the floor and covered his ears against gunfire._

_Klaus considered bolting through the door, but couldn’t risk tripping up Patch if she decided to make a hasty retreat. Crawling through the vent it was._

_Klaus grabbed his coat and slipped into the air duct, inchworming along in his bloody bath towel. More shots rang out behind him. Klaus crawled faster._

_You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out. You’re real, you’re alive, you’re going to get out._

“Klaus?”

Klaus should have stayed. Why didn’t he stay to make sure Patch made it out okay?

“Klaus.”

Klaus’s eyes snap to Diego, a snarl of guilt and horror and sadness tangling up in the pit of his stomach. “I didn’t know she died.”

It’s a good thing they haven’t pulled out yet, because everything about Diego’s expression says _tire screech_.

Diego opens and closes his mouth twice before croaking, “What?”

Klaus slips his damp hands under his thighs and hooks his ankles together. “She saved me. Patch. I didn’t recognize her.”

“Wait.” Diego’s face is screwed up in pain and confusion. “Wait,” he says again. “You were with Dora? At the motel?”

Klaus frowns. “You didn’t send her?”

“What are you talking about?” Diego says, frustration cutting through his confusion now.

Clearly, wires are crossed somewhere. Klaus is ninety-nine percent sure he mentioned this whole torturing business to Diego before their ice cream truck car chase. Although now he can see how Diego’s head might have been elsewhere.

Klaus takes a breath. “Hazel and Cha-Cha kidnapped me from the Academy. They were torturing me for information about Five in that motel room. Patch helped me escape, but—” Klaus swallows. “I didn’t know she died. I shouldn’t have left her. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You wouldn’t have been much help, unarmed and injured,” Ben offers from the backseat.

Amazing how that does not make Klaus feel any better.

Diego takes several breaths through his nose while he processes this new information. Klaus braces himself for Diego to either start yelling or storm off.

Diego surprises him by saying, “Dora was looking for Five.”

“What?”

“We couldn’t find Five after Hazel and Cha-Cha attacked the Academy,” Diego says. “I told Dora. That’s who she was looking for. I didn’t know you were gone.”

“Oh.”

Klaus told as much to the motel wall, but hearing Diego say it still makes the bottom drop out of Klaus’s stomach.

“Are you okay?” Diego says quietly.

This is such a dumb question, Klaus laughs. “Sure. I’ve been choked harder by Luther.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Klaus says quickly. “I’m kidding.”

“Klaus—”

“Don’t,” Klaus pleads. “Just—don’t, okay? It’s over now. Patch had my back. I’m sorry I didn’t have hers.”

Diego stares at the steering wheel. “She died saving someone’s life,” he says, and swipes the back of one gloved hand under his nose. “If she had to go...”

“Yeah,” Klaus says, so Diego doesn’t have to finish the thought.

Silence.

“She came into that motel room guns blazing,” Klaus adds. “Never seen anyone that idiotically brave except you.”

The gentleness of Patch’s hands when she cut Klaus loose also had a Diego-like quality to it, but Klaus keeps that to himself. Diego isn’t the kind of guy who needs his kindnesses pointed out to him, lest he get self-conscious.

“She’s the best person I ever met,” Diego says. “Now that she’s gone, all these little things keep coming back. Like, how she’d chew on a pen cap while she was reading a file. Or pull her food out of the microwave when it had one second left, because she didn’t like the beep. Or smile when she got a phone call from her mom.”

Diego looks at Klaus a little helplessly, and Klaus looks helplessly back, because he doesn’t know what to do with the broken pieces Diego is holding out to him.

What help is Klaus, of all people, supposed to offer?

All he has is commiseration.

“Sometimes, I can’t fall asleep because the room sounds too quiet without Dave snoring right behind my ear,” Klaus says, twisting his fingers in the dog tags around his neck.

Diego watches the anxious motion of Klaus’s hands. “Outside the VA,” he says slowly, as if recalling something from a dream. “You said you’d lost someone.”

Klaus nods.

Diego’s eyes meet his. “Dave.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

Even days too late, the sentiment makes Klaus’s eyes sting.

“When did he pass?”

Klaus can’t help it. He laughs.

“No, it’s not funny,” Klaus says, in response to Diego’s _what the fuck_ look. “That’s just—a way more complicated question than you think it is. If we sit here while I answer, we’ll never get to the beach. You drive, I’ll talk.”

“Okay,” Diego says dubiously, and starts the car.

 

By the time they arrive at the beach, Diego has decided he needs to go on a walk. By himself.

Klaus is still, it seems, someone best handled in small doses, and Diego got quite a large dose on their commute to the coast.

“Well, _I_ feel better,” Klaus tells Ben, as he hikes up his skirt to step ankle-deep into seafoam.

“Talking about your feelings made you feel better,” Ben deadpans. “What a revelation.”

Klaus kicks a spray of water straight through him. “I’m surprised how well he took it,” he says, watching the speck of Diego’s figure disappear down the coast. “I expected a lot more disbelief.”

“After all the unbelievable shit that’s gone down since we came home, I think Diego is logically obligated to believe anything anyone says from now on."

Diego doesn’t reappear until sunset. By then, Klaus is busy constructing an elaborate sandcastle to Ben’s exact specifications. Moat and all.

“Nice,” Diego says, circling Klaus’s handiwork with an expression that’s as surprised as it is admiring.

“I am but the corporal hands executing Ben’s grand vision,” Klaus says, sharpening the turret of the tallest tower. He looks to Ben, who gives his stamp of approval with a thumbs-up. To Diego, “How was your walk?”

Diego shrugs. He still looks unhappy.

Klaus squints at him in the setting sun. “Should I be offended that an entire afternoon isn’t enough detox-from-Klaus time?” His accompanying smirk is strained; flippancy is way harder to pull off sober.

“Detox from— _no_. Jesus, Klaus.”

“What?”

Diego shakes his head and sits down in the sand. Tentatively, Klaus takes a seat beside him.

“I talk to you more than anyone since Dora,” Diego says, directing his words out at the ocean, “but every time you open your mouth, I feel more like… I don’t know you. Like, at all.”

Klaus’s heart sinks. Barring Ben, Diego knows him better than anyone. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Diego says sharply. Klaus recoils. “Stop. I didn’t mean—fuck.” Diego bends his knees, folds his forearms across them, and rests his chin on top.

Klaus waits.

“You have to tell me shit,” Diego says.

Klaus raises his eyebrows.

“I mean, you don’t have to,” Diego says. “But you should.”

“Why?” Klaus says.

Diego seems unprepared for the question. “Because,” he starts, and stops. “Because that’s what family is supposed to do.”

“Since when do we do anything that families are supposed to?”

Diego rolls his eyes, like Klaus is playing dumb. Klaus thinks this is a perfectly reasonable line of questioning.

“Because I want you to,” Diego says, which—

Oh. “You do?”

“Would we be having this conversation if I didn’t?” Diego says.

Fair point. Diego’s face is set like someone is literally holding his feet to fire.

Again, Klaus thinks: _Oh_.

He’s kind of breathless with wonder over the fact that Diego not only knows Klaus (whatever Diego thinks), but he _wants_ to know Klaus. How crazy is that?

“Okay,” Klaus says. “Yeah, I—I can do that. If you do.”

“Yeah?” Diego says, his tone challenging, but eyes seeking reassurance.

“Yeah,” Klaus says.

Diego sticks out his chin, nods, and looks to the ocean. “Cool.”

“Cool.”

“Adorable,” Ben says.

They sit in comfortable silence until it occurs to Klaus, “I should probably tell you about dying and meeting God now, then, or it’ll be awkward later.”

“Tell me about _what_?”

 

Klaus’s window rattles in its pane. Vanya must be training.

“Wish they’d take that outside,” Klaus says, re-hooking a loop of yarn around a peg at the top of his loom.

(Klaus read somewhere that knitting is helpful for getting over an addiction, but Klaus hasn’t quite reached knitting-level craftsmanship yet, as evidenced by the many tangles of thread abandoned on his desk. The repetitive over-under-over-under of threading yarn across the loom is a much easier way to keep his hands busy and his mind focused.)

“They _are_ outside,” Ben says, looking out the window into the courtyard.

Klaus shakes his head. Vanya is a force of nature. Yesterday, she sneezed and accidentally shattered the teacup Klaus was holding. (Klaus is coming around on Chamomile, when it’s not exploding out of his grip.) “Luther’s literally shaking in his boots somewhere.”

Ben hums his agreement and turns away from the window. “You ready?”

“Yeah,” Klaus says. “Check it out.” He turns the loom around proudly. He’s only recently gotten the hang of switching between different colored yarns to weave rough patterns. The “B” he’s stitched into this vaguely square patch of fabric is so lopsided it’s practically italicized, but it’s still pretty impressive for a beginner, if Klaus says so himself.

“Nice,” Ben says, and Klaus grins proudly.

Which means he’s probably due for a séance training session to knock him down a peg.

“I have a good feeling about today,” Ben says, as Klaus tucks away his weaving equipment.

Ben says that a lot. Klaus doesn’t mind. With nothing yet to show for all their effort, Ben’s enthusiasm is pretty much the only thing keeping Klaus going.

“If you say so,” Klaus says, leading the way downstairs. They always train in the parlor now, as a nonverbal signal to Diego that his company is welcome, since he never enters Klaus’s room.

Apparently, when Diego said ‘we’ll figure this out,’ what he meant was, ‘you and Ben will figure this out, and I’ll sit in the corner with my whittling and offer silent moral support.’ Whereas someone like Five might be tempted to jump in with an unfounded opinion, Diego attends every training session under the very explicit assumption that he knows fuck-all about the paranormal. The most he ever participates is by snapping at Klaus that he shouldn’t be so goddamn hard on himself when Klaus is on the brink of frustrated tears—and then promptly leaving to make them both green tea so that Klaus can cry, if he must.

Klaus tentatively wants to say this system is working. Insomuch as he can say anything is working, when he still has yet to accomplish anything.

“What are you gonna use today?” Ben says while Klaus pushes the coffee table out of the way, so they can sit cross-legged on the rug.

“Allison, probably,” Klaus says.

“That’s a good one,” Ben says.

Ben still hasn’t given up on this using-good-feelings-as-fuel idea. After Allison’s check-up in the infirmary yesterday, Mom announced that she should, in time, regain full use of her voice.

Hello, happiness.

If Klaus’s over-the-moon feeling at hearing that news isn’t enough to make Ben manifest, nothing is.

 

By dinnertime, Klaus is starting to think that nothing is.

 

“I’m sorry,” Klaus says, knees tucked up into a fetal position on the rug in the dark parlor later that night. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ben says, but he sounds tired. “You’ll get it.”

For the first time since they started, he says it like he might not totally believe it.

 

Of course it would be that Ben’s third appearance is another complete accident.

 

For the most part, sobriety at home is a lot like sobriety in rehab: made possible only through the myriad distractions and near constant company that come with living among five other (living) people. Unlike rehab, Klaus’s current living situation has no foreseeable end, because everyone appears to be sticking around the Academy indefinitely.

Luther, because he has no other home address on this planet.

Five, because he hasn’t worked out how to fast-forward his bodily development without scrambling his brain or the spacetime continuum.

Vanya, because she is still a pint-sized atomic bomb who blew the Academy’s fuse yesterday when Luther unexpectedly reached over her head to grab something off a top shelf.

Allison, because Vanya is still a pint-sized atomic bomb.

Diego, because Klaus. Also, because Diego likes the company.

Diego would never say as much, and Klaus doesn’t mention it, because Diego’s desire for human contact is a lot like Diego’s kindness: better left unmentioned, if Klaus wants it to continue. And Klaus does want Diego to stick around. Diego is good company, even if he has a tendency to leave small piles of wood shavings around the house.

Even with all these options for company, Klaus can’t be glued to a sibling’s side all hours of the day. It’s those in-between times that pose the greatest threat to Klaus’s sobriety.

Klaus weaves. He takes bike rides. He loses himself in crowds at the mall. He swims laps at the community rec center. Klaus is starting to build up a whole new utility belt, filled with what Dr. Reynolds and Ben would call ‘healthy coping mechanisms.’

Sometimes, though, Klaus doesn’t have the energy to cope.

Today, for instance.

The last two days, actually. That’s how long this particular ghost has been dogging Klaus, trying to convince Klaus to visit his children. The ghost has, in cycles, attempted pleading with Klaus, yelling at him, weeping for hours at a time, and pulling out a wallet full of family photos for the world’s most morbid show-and-tell. He’s currently on a round of weeping-slash-pleading.

_Klaus, please… I have to see them…_

Klaus is lying on his bed with his pillow folded around his head to cover his ears. How many hours have they been at this?

 _How can you lie there, knowing you could help_...

Klaus closes his eyes. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

 _How can you be so selfish_...

Klaus can be so selfish, because he’s been down this road before.

Since Klaus was a kid, ghost after ghost has begged him to visit this family member or that, to pass along various kinds of messages. When Klaus was little, countless logistical obstacles prevented him from meeting their requests. When he got older, intoxication came to the rescue.

But the second time Klaus got sober, he no longer had a father tracking his every move or an inebriated headspace to escape into. He had no excuse not to listen to another ghost who needed to see her husband one last time. After she stalked him for the better part of a week, Klaus relented.

Klaus, who had never been on so much as a single job interview, wasn’t primed to consider how his appearance might affect a stranger’s willingness to hear him out. In hindsight, Klaus can understand how a homeless-looking twenty-something didn’t cut a very official figure as Ambassador to the Afterlife. He can also understand how accosting a grieving man outside the grocery store and claiming to be in contact with his dead wife earned him a rough shove onto the pavement. And how following the man to his car earned Klaus a sock on the nose.

(Klaus understands these things even more acutely now, after the mad grief of losing Dave inspired him to start a bar fight with half a dozen middle-aged veterans—but let it be known that Klaus understood these things before that, too.)

The ghost didn’t take this rejection with as much finality as Klaus, whose reaction was to limp home, pinching the bridge of his bloody nose. She begged him to go back, try again.

The shot of heroin that finally shut her up is one of the best Klaus ever had.

He doesn’t think Ben blames him for that particular relapse.

After that, Klaus vowed: Never again.

Until today, he’d never met another spirit that persistent. But all records are made to be broken, Klaus supposes.

 _Please, Klaus. I’ll never be able to rest, if I can’t say goodbye_ …

Rest sounds so nice. Klaus hasn’t properly slept since yesterday morning. Please, he wants to _sleep_.

_How could you deny two little girls one last chance to see their father?_

Klaus is fully aware of the irony that wanting to say goodbye to Dave is what got him into this mess in the first place. But how can Klaus say yes, when there’s an infinite queue of ghosts who could line up to make the exact same request?

Klaus knows their pain so intimately, but he can’t handle their pain, on top of his own. That’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not—

“Klaus.”

Klaus doesn’t realize, until he shifts to look up at Ben, that the pillow under his cheek is wet.

“Breathe.”

For once, this is utterly useless advice. Klaus isn’t on the edge of a panic attack, he’s just sad. He’s so, so sad. He’s sad for the ghost. He’s sad for the ghost’s daughters. He’s sad for himself and Dave and Ben and everyone stuck on opposite sides of death’s curtain.

Klaus wants to shrink into a tiny pinpoint and blink out of existence, if that’s what it takes for the sadness to stop.

“It isn’t forever,” Ben says.

But that’s the deal with sobriety, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be forever. One long forever of weathering one storm, only for another to roll in after.

Klaus misses his mental bunker. That’s the only place he’s ever truly felt safe.

But alone.

Always alone. Even when Klaus had Ben and Diego, he didn’t have them like he does now.

Klaus knows, objectively speaking, that the life he’s made for himself back at the Academy is better than the one he left behind. He wants to keep it, but he doesn’t know how. The arc of Klaus’s life bends towards failure, so it’s only a matter of time before—

 _You selfish, low-life_ —

“You’re going to be okay,” Ben says.

He’s not. Klaus will never be okay. If this ghost ever leaves, there will be another, and another, and eventually, Klaus will break. He’s come so close already. If Ben hadn’t slapped him out of it last time, Klaus would have broken already, and Klaus doesn’t know how to bring him back.

 _You have no idea what it’s like_ —

Klaus wants it to stop. Please, make it stop—

“Diego!”

Ben’s voice, muffled by the pillow pressed against Klaus’s ears, barely registers over the sound of his own sobbing and—

 _You have to help me, Klaus, you’re the only one_ —

Diego barging through Klaus’s door, though. That gets Klaus’s attention.

Diego enters the room with daggers out, gaze swiveling around in search of a threat. His eyes finally pan up from Klaus’s rumpled, pit-stained pajamas to his red-rimmed eyes.

“What’s going on?” Diego says. His gives the room another suspicious once-over as he sheathes his knives. “I thought I heard…”

_Klaus... KLAUS!_

Klaus scrunches his eyes shut and turns into the pillow.

“Hey.” Diego’s voice is closer now. “Klaus. What’s wrong?”

Klaus peels one eye open. Diego is crouching beside his bed now, nose less than a foot away from Klaus’s.

“Ask him for help,” Ben says.

Ask for help. So simple, in theory. But Klaus is out of practice. Klaus hasn’t had to ask for Diego’s help yet, it’s just… come. Klaus wouldn’t even know what to—

_KLAUS!_

Klaus flinches.

“Hey.” Diego’s hand covers Klaus’s shoulder. “You’re freaking me out, dude.”

“Klaus,” Ben insists.

“Ghost.” One word. Progress.

Diego looks around, like a bedsheet figure might burst out of Klaus’s closet. “Here? Right now?”

Klaus nods.

Diego shudders. “Is it…” Diego takes stock of Klaus’s snotty nose and wet cheeks. “...hurting you?”

Klaus shakes his head.

“Bothering you.”

Klaus nods. Emphatically.

The crease between Diego’s eyebrows deepens. Pained. Worried. “What can I do?”

Technically, nothing. Diego can’t silence the ghost anymore than Klaus can. But neither can Ben, and Ben helps all the time.

“Stay,” Klaus says, wincing at the humiliating break in his voice. “Please stay.”

Diego's mouth becomes a thin line, and he squeezes Klaus's shoulder. “Okay.”

 

Diego stays long after the ghost has given up on Klaus. The phantom hasn’t vanished yet, but he has resigned himself to grumbling, more or less quietly, in the corner.

Five is the one to find them, some hours later. Klaus with his head pillowed on one of Diego’s legs and Diego reading the only book within reach on Klaus’s windowsill: _Twilight_. Klaus thought he’d give up quickly and insist Klaus move so he could find something better from his own room, but Diego is nearly halfway through. Ben, meanwhile, is rereading some Russian novel Klaus has seen him conjure up a dozen times before.

Klaus, exhaustion catching up to him, is suspended somewhere between sleep and wakefulness when knuckles rap against his door, and Five enters without awaiting invitation.

“Mom says dinner is almost ready,” Five says, and frowns at the strange scene before him.

Diego makes an affirmative grunt from behind his book.

Klaus waits for Five to leave.

Five does not.

“What’s up with you?” Five says, directing an upward nod at Klaus.

Klaus’s hand automatically tightens its grip on Diego’s knee.

“None of your goddamn business,” Diego says, more aggressively than seems strictly necessary.

“Nothing,” Klaus cuts in before Five can retort. If they start arguing, Klaus doesn’t trust Diego not to get up, and he doesn’t want Diego to get up. “Be down in a minute.”

Five gives the pair of them one last, lingering look and shrugs, like he’s above all the drama. As if that mannequin of his isn’t going to get an earful about this later.

Five shuts the door only most of the way behind him. Klaus makes no pretense of preparing to get up. Neither does Diego.

A few minutes later, the ajar door swings back open.

“We’ll be right—” Diego’s snappish greeting cuts off when Allison, rather than Five, pokes her head around the door. She smiles and enters carrying two covered plates. Klaus’s stomach gives him a painful reminder that he hasn’t eaten since yesterday.

Allison sets their dishes down on Klaus’s desk and turns to briefly rest her hand in Klaus’s hair before she heads for the door.

Klaus’s heart is in his throat. “Thanks, Allison.”

Allison smiles at him again before pulling the door shut with a soft click.

Klaus closes his eyes. He loves this family.

 

“Well, now we know that fear isn’t the only emotion that works,” Klaus says later that night, after Diego has left. Fed and bathed, and with Ben as the only ghost left in his room, Klaus is in a tentatively good mood.

“Now _you_ know fear isn’t the only emotion that works,” Ben says. “I already knew.”

If Klaus’s eyes were open, he’d roll them. Instead, he snuggles deeper into his pillow and flaps a hand in Ben’s general direction. “You and your precious ego.”

“It is literally all I have left.”

“Hey,” Klaus whines, trying to summon the energy to sound properly offended. “You have me.”

“Yes,” Ben allows, soft enough about it that Klaus grins into his pillow, “and I look forward to you taking my happiness strategy more seriously from now on.”

Klaus makes a noncommittal noise. “You never know. Might only work for bad feelings.”

“Wow, you really are determined to be the world’s biggest cynic, huh.”

“Five,” Klaus offers as a counterpoint.

“Fake,” Ben declares. “A true pessimist would never try that hard to save the world.”

Klaus shrugs. “You’re probably right.”

As a rule, Klaus does not pursue debates he doesn’t have a hope of winning. This saves a lot of time and trouble, where Ben is concerned.

Ben is probably right about the happy feeling thing, too.

The problem is, Academy life in the denouement of the non-apocalypse has become—dare Klaus say it?—kind of quaint. For the most part, Klaus is not complaining. But the quiet life doesn’t present much of an opportunity for transcendent elation. And Klaus is going to need some next-level euphoria to rival the crushing terror of the mausoleum, where Klaus’s yearning for someone to save him became a full-body ache. Or when Klaus was so angry that he wanted to hurt Ben like he’d never wanted to hurt him before. Or when—or when…

Hold up.

Klaus sits up.

“What?” Ben says.

Klaus lifts a silencing finger. Something is coming together in his head, and he needs a minute to figure out how the pieces fit.

He thinks himself back to the basement: Luther coming at him, and Klaus’s throat closing around the word _help_. Back to this afternoon: Klaus digging his nails into his palms to distract from the unrelenting desperation for Ben to pull off one more miracle and save Klaus from his own despair.

It’s so simple. It’s so obvious that only Klaus could have made this thing so much more complicated than it needs to be.

“I think… you were wrong,” Klaus says.

If he’s ever been able to say that to Ben before, Klaus doesn’t remember.

Neither does Ben, by the looks of it. “What?”

“When I do weird things with my powers,” Klaus says, breathless with the heady rush of epiphany. “It’s not the emotion itself, it’s—it’s the desperation that comes after.”

Ben’s frown changes from confused to concerned. “Klaus…”

“No, listen,” Klaus says, because the shape of this new idea is still crystallizing in his mind, and Klaus needs to put it into words before it drifts out of focus. “When I was so angry I wanted to strangle you, or terrified Luther was going to strangle me, there was this—”

Klaus’s hands cover his chest. He doesn’t know quite how to explain the awful longing. He searches Ben’s face for understanding, hoping that Ben, in all his usual brilliance, can just _get this_ without Klaus having to explain.

Ben’s face is blank.

“This—” mindless, frenzied, wordless pleading “—need for you to be there,” Klaus continues, feeling pathetic and embarrassed, but unsure how else to explain. “That’s what made it different. The wishing for you to be there, in a way that was more—just _more_ than normal.”

‘Wishing’ is not exactly the right word here. It’s too shallow to convey the cavernous feeling that Klaus is fumbling to describe. A sensation deeper than the most skin-itching, hair-tearing cravings Klaus has ever suffered in the throes of withdrawal.

Klaus is well used to Ben watching him closely, but not like this. He can almost hear the grind and click of gears turning inside his brother’s head. At length, Ben says, “Even in the mausoleum?”

It takes Klaus a few blinks to figure out what Ben is asking. “I don’t know if I was thinking about you, specifically, consciously,” Klaus says. “Maybe you’re the only one I thought would come, even if I didn’t know what I was asking for. You were—”

More than the teammate Klaus trusted most to have his back on a mission. More than the only brother Klaus trusted to watch him doodle hearts around photos of Aaron Carter in teen magazines. Things are different now, with Diego, but back then, “You were the only one I ever trusted to give a damn what happened to me,” Klaus finishes, feeling small.

For most of his life, Klaus has gotten away with talking a lot while saying very little. But over the past few weeks, Klaus has excavated more truths than he even remembers hiding inside himself. This shit is exhausting. How is it not over yet.

Ben’s mouth is open, but no sound comes out. Klaus can’t blame him. Hell of a thing for Klaus to have just laid on him. Klaus picks at the blanket in his lap.

In the end, Ben simply hovers a palm over the bump of Klaus’s blanket-covered knee and gives it two intangible pats.

“If anomalies in your power really come down to you wishing hard enough,” Ben says, tactfully pivoting back to the matter at hand, “what actually makes it _enough_? Because there have been other times that, you know.” Ben gives a demonstrative hand wave.

“Yeah,” Klaus says, because he doesn’t have fingers and toes enough to count all the times he’s said ‘I wish you were here’ to Ben’s ghost over the years. “But most of the time when I want something, I don’t actually expect to get it, right? So the wanting is sort of.” Klaus pulls his shoulders up to his ears and lets them drop helplessly. “Muted.”

Ben’s mouth turns down sympathetically, and Klaus hurries on, “But when I’m totally freaking out, there’s no space for second-guessing. There’s just the…” yearning sensation so intense it feels like someone’s opened an airlock inside Klaus’s chest.

“Not a huge surprise that it’s stronger when I’m sober,” Klaus rambles on, “since I actually feel like I’m living in my body now, rather than just.” Klaus makes an abstract, circular gesture. “Remote-controlling it.” Or making a conscious effort to ward off Ben’s ghost, as he had been for the two years preceding the incident in the mausoleum.

Ben looks contemplative now, which is a definite step up from pitying. Klaus awaits his assessment.

“It’s the desperation,” Ben muses, narrowing his eyes slightly at the middle distance. “The desperation.”

“The wishing,” Klaus amends, trying to put a positive spin on it, in case Ben is thinking back to his _“We’re doing this right, or not at all”_ rule, and making Klaus feel desperation falls into the latter category.

“The wishing,” Ben allows. He taps his index finger against his chin. “Okay. Wishing, we can work with.”

 

Knowing what muscle to flex makes all the difference.

The first time Ben blinks back into physical existence, Diego yelps and leaps up from the sofa.

“There!” Diego points at the space in front of Klaus occupied by a once-again translucent Ben. “He was right there.”

“Are you sure?” Klaus says. He’s been staring at Ben so intently for the better part of an hour, Klaus was half-convinced that Ben’s split-second opacity was a trick of the light.

Diego nods dumbly.

Klaus’s stomach squeezes with excitement, and he turns wide eyes on Ben. “I did it,” he breathes. Then, with more conviction, “I did it!”

“Hell yeah you did,” Ben says, holding his hand up for a fist-bump.

Klaus knocks his knuckles through Ben’s and turns to Diego, to invite him into this happy moment, but Diego is still staring through Ben.

Klaus frowns. “Diego?” When Diego doesn’t answer, Klaus waves his _hello_ hand through Diego’s line of sight. “Earth to Diego. You okay?”

“What?” Diego blinks himself out of it and lowers himself onto the sofa. “Yeah.”

Klaus exchanges a glance with Ben. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Diego says again. He’s staring at Klaus now, which Klaus doesn’t like much better.

“...Yeah?” Klaus presses.

“ _Yes_ ,” Diego says. He sounds more annoyed than astonished now. That’s more like it. “It’s fucking incredible, is all.”

If Klaus were drinking anything, this is where he’d do a spit-take. “I’m sorry, what now?”

“You, bringing Ben here,” Diego says, with surprising candor. “Me, getting to see him.”

Klaus realizes belatedly that Diego is looking at him, not like Klaus has pulled off a super impressive magic trick, but rather like Klaus has given him an extremely precious gift.

Klaus’s mouth forms a silent ‘oh.’

It’s not that Klaus ever forgets that he’s the only one who can see Ben any time he wants, but Klaus does sometimes forget to appreciate that fact.

He doesn’t know what to say. Both ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome’ seem equally inappropriate, so Klaus settles on, “You can hold your applause until his physical form lasts longer than a sneeze.”

“Learn to take a compliment,” Ben says.

“Not exactly used to it,” Klaus grumbles.

“Excuse you.”

“From anyone else,” Klaus amends.

Ben shrugs. Klaus has him there.

Diego’s eyes flick from Klaus to the apparently empty space in front of him and back again. “You really live in a totally different world than the rest of us.”

Well. Klaus is willing to bet no one else had to brush his teeth this morning with a ghost watching him in the bathroom mirror. But, “You already knew that,” Klaus points out.

“I didn’t think about it,” Diego says. “You never talked about it.”

The response that comes most readily to mind is _sorry_ , but Diego keeps telling Klaus not to apologize for things, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Diego, for better or for worse, is getting much better at reading Klaus’s silences. He heaves the deep sigh of a man searching all corners of himself for spare patience. “I’m not guilt-tripping you,” Diego says. “It’s just weird. You and Vanya, sitting on these incredible powers none of us ever knew about.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Klaus says, because he feels this is a point worth emphasizing, “I would not count manifesting Ben for half a second as ‘incredible.’”

Vanya is the one going around causing low-magnitude earthquakes every time she gets a stress headache.

Ben looks poised to launch into a lecture, but Diego beats him to it. “Yeah, well. Sober-you has a self-loathing streak a mile wide, so you don’t get a say.”

“Ouch,” Klaus says, aiming for sarcasm and not quite making it.

Diego shrugs. “Not an insult. A fact.”

Klaus is pretty sure those are not mutually exclusive categories. “You sound like Ben.”

“You’re saying I’m right, then,” Diego says.

Ben smiles triumphantly. Klaus gives Ben the finger, and then chucks a nearby throw pillow at Diego. “Go make me tea,” he says, pointing imperiously toward the kitchen. “I deserve it for being incredible.”

Diego does, with the smug air of a man who’s won the argument.

 

Klaus thought that, at some point, Diego would find his chill about Klaus manifesting Ben.

Diego does not. He doesn’t emit unintentional, undignified noises anymore, but he does still point with an awestruck expression wherever Ben appears. Klaus calls him dramatic and secretly hopes Diego never stops.

What? It’s a good ego-boost.

Sometimes, Diego has company for a few rounds of I Spy Ben’s Ghost. This may be evidence of how little there is to do around here, now that the world isn’t in danger, and a grand total of one (1) of them is gainfully employed. That one being Diego, whose days must surely be numbered, since—as far as Klaus can tell—he hasn’t been to the boxing gym in over a week.

Vanya and Allison tend to wander into the parlor when they’re on a break from Vanya’s training. This, Klaus doesn’t mind at all. Sometimes, Luther or Five finds his way into an armchair instead. This, Klaus minds slightly more.

“You could tell him to go away,” Ben says, watching Klaus watch Five make himself comfortable in a seat by the window with his morning double espresso.

“I would,” Klaus says, even though he probably wouldn’t, “but I think it’s helping.”

 _You are very, very afraid of disappointing people_.

Ben, as usual, was right on the money. But for once in his life, Klaus’s crippling terror of not being enough could actually come in handy, here. If Klaus’s desperation to manifest Ben again is usually dialed to a five or six, having Luther or Five in the audience for training cranks that up to an eight or nine, easy.

Case in point: The first time Klaus sustains Ben’s physical form long enough for Ben to get out a full sentence, Luther is the only one around to see it.

Luther doesn’t stride into the parlor and park himself in a chair the way Five does. He tends to shuffle his feet in the foyer before asking Klaus if he can sit in.

At first, Klaus assumes this is because Diego has assumed guard-dog-like vigilance over most of Klaus’s training sessions. But when Klaus mentions it to Allison over lunch, she simply writes, _HE’S TRYING_.

“Trying to do what?” Klaus says.

Allison starts and scratches out half a dozen explanations before settling on: _TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ‘NUMBER ONE’ IN PEACETIME_.

Klaus hadn’t considered the fact that, without Dad’s instructions to follow or a common enemy to rally his siblings against, Luther might be going through a little quarter-life crisis of his own.

Is it possible that Luther is attending Klaus’s training sessions for supportive, rather than surveillance reasons?

To be perfectly frank, Klaus still feels very much surveilled. But his conversation with Allison does leave Klaus looking at Luther through slightly more sympathetic eyes.

The first night Ben sticks around for longer than a few seconds, the house is quiet. Allison is visiting Claire, Vanya and Five are on a late-night donut run, and Diego has been lured away by some intriguing chatter on his police scanner. Luther is doing a crossword by the light of a table lamp across the room while Klaus and Ben work at their usual spots on the floor.

It’s difficult for Klaus to discern Ben’s shift from see-through to solid in this lighting, but Klaus knows it’s coming because Ben says, “Here we go.”

After all their practice, Ben has developed a keen sense for the symptoms of manifestation—which, he says, feels something like the falling-into-your-body sensation of decelerating on a downward elevator.

“Aye aye,” Klaus says, touching fingers to his temples and staring Ben down with tunnel-vision focus.

The record to beat is a meager four-point-something seconds, but Klaus has a good feeling about tonight. He’s just ticking off the third consecutive second in his head when Luther’s hesitant “Ben?” makes Klaus jump.

Klaus and a shockingly-still-solid Ben both turn to look at their brother, whose crossword puzzle has slid onto the floor.

“Hey,” Ben says.

“Hey,” Luther echoes faintly. “Welcome back.”

“Good to be back,” Ben says, “under better circumstances.”

Luther swallows. “Yeah, I—sorry. About last time.”

“It’s—” Ben begins, but he’s already fading.

Luther half stands, expression crumpling. “Ben?” he says loudly.

“Shit,” Klaus says, digging his fingertips into his forehead and straining to reel Ben back. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Relax,” Ben says. “That was still way longer than last time.”

“I know,” Klaus says, “but he’s—” Klaus drags his eyes back over to Luther, who’s gazing at the cavity of space that Ben occupied moments ago. “Sorry. I can’t hold it very long yet.”

If Luther registers Klaus’s apology, he doesn’t acknowledge it. As in the basement, the sight of Ben has sapped most of the color from their big brother’s face. Luther’s voice, when he finds it, is hoarse. “I can’t believe he was here.”

Klaus watches in startled silence as Luther covers his mouth with his hand.

Diego is one thing. He might pretend to have the emotional capacity of a rock, but Klaus knows the truth. Don’t think Klaus hasn’t noticed that all three _Twilight_ sequels have mysteriously vanished from his bookshelf one by one over the last two weeks.

Luther, on the other hand.

“You okay?” Klaus says hesitantly. Luther sort of looks like he could use a hug, but Klaus has more than learned his lesson about cozying up to a distressed Luther Hargreeves.

Luther nods. He peels his hand away from his mouth to say, “I _know_ he’s there, now, but seeing him is still…” Luther shakes his head. “It’s so surreal, you know?”

Technically, Klaus doesn’t know, since he had quite the opposite problem of seeing Ben long before he knew his brother was really there. But the unexpected vulnerability on Luther’s face makes him look so young that Klaus couldn’t possibly offer anything but simple, firm reassurance.

“Yeah, man,” Klaus says. “I know.”

 

The first time Klaus accidentally manifests Ben again, they’re alone in the courtyard.

The sky is a dome of perfect blue, barring a few jetstream scars. Ben is sketching while Klaus latch-hooks a canvas grid patterned with a rainbow peace sign. This latest pastime came by recommendation of Doris, the yarn store clerk who supplies Klaus’s weaving ventures.

_“What is all this?” Diego said, when he found Klaus sorting yarn snippets into color-coded piles across the kitchen table._

_“The makings of a very fuzzy rug,” Klaus said, separating his purples from his periwinkles._

_“All your new hobbies are for grandmas.”_

_“Right, because_ whittling _is all the rage with the youths, these days.”_

_“...Shut up.”_

Klaus pauses in his latch hook to roll out his wrist.

“How goes it?” Ben says without looking up from his notebook.

“Slowly,” Klaus says.

Ben nods absently and continues to shade some unseen scene with extreme precision.

Ben has always had a _thing_ about not letting other people see what he’s writing or sketching, so Klaus doesn’t bother asking to look. But it does make him wonder.

Klaus doesn’t think it’s a stretch to say that he knows Ben better than anyone in the world. If nothing else, Klaus has almost thirteen more years of Ben’s company under his belt than anyone else. But Klaus is still coming to terms with the realization that Ben has had thirteen years’ worth of rich internal life that Klaus has never bothered to inquire about.

At the risk of projecting, the most important thing to Klaus now—besides giving Ben a physical body to inhabit—is making sure Ben feels _known_.

Besides, if all of Klaus’s thoughts and feelings have to be poked and prodded all the time, it seems only fair that someone else be on the receiving end of a probing question every now and then.

“What did you want to be when you grew up?” Klaus says. “If we ever left the Academy, that is.”

That gets Ben’s full, shrewd attention. “Why?”

“No reason.”

Ben’s expression is one of flat disbelief.

“Because I should have asked when we were kids,” Klaus says, “but back then I was too much of a navel-gazing little shit.”

“As opposed to now...”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

Ben chews the inside of his cheek.

“C’mon,” Klaus wheedles. “None of your childhood dreams could be any worse than my real-life choices.”

“You have set a conveniently low bar,” Ben admits.

“That’s the spirit,” Klaus says. “Let’s have it.”

After another moment’s hesitation, Ben answers by turning around his sketchbook.

It’s a series of comic panels, starring—

“Is that us?” Klaus leans forward to get a better look at Ben’s translucent sketchbook.

“Yeah,” Ben says, a nervous tinge to his voice. “Do you remember?”

“Of course,” Klaus says. Truth be told, Klaus’s memories of that particular day are hazy at best. A piece of falling debris clocked him on the head as he and the others fled the Eiffel Tower, right before it rocketed into space. But the snarling visage of zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel isn’t something you forget, brain damage or no.

“This is so cool,” Klaus says, examining a detailed rendering of child-Diego whipping a dagger into cyborg-Eiffel’s eye socket. “The expressions are perfect.” Even in cartoon form, the upward tilt of Diego’s chin and the determined set of Luther’s jaw are unmistakable.

“Thanks,” Ben says modestly.

Klaus scans the speech bubbles. “How did you write Eiffel’s lines? You don’t speak French.”

“Un petit peu,” Ben says.

“What the fuck,” Klaus whispers.

Ben shrugs. “I picked it up from Becca.”

Klaus squints. “Who?”

“Becca,” Ben says. “You lived with her for like, three months when we were twenty-three. Attic bedroom of that row house by the river?”

“Ah. Right,” Klaus says, feigning recollection.

Ben’s expression makes it abundantly clear Klaus is not fooling anyone. “Becca was taking an online French course,” he says. “Ghosts don’t actually stop existing the second you get high, you know. What else was I supposed to do?”

“Draw, apparently,” Klaus says. “These are amazing.” He wishes he could take Ben’s notebook and hold it under his nose for a closer look.

“They’re all right.”

“No,” Klaus says. “Ben. They’re really, really good.”

“Thanks,” Ben says, smile bittersweet. “Not that it matters anymore.”

Klaus inhales at the onset of a feeling that’s becoming more familiar everyday: the sense, deep inside his chest, that a series of stitches is straining and splitting under the swell of Klaus’s wanting, _wishing_ for Ben to be here, for real.

“Klaus?” Ben holds his arms out from his torso as though trying to find his balance. “Are you doing that on purpose?”

“I am now,” Klaus says, watching in astonishment as a dark shadow shades in the grass beside Ben, slanting away from the afternoon sun. Technically, this is supposed to be Klaus’s mental recovery day, but he’s not going to waste the opportunity to ride a powerful feeling when it rolls in. Klaus is actually kind of amazed at how strong that came on, when he wasn’t even trying, just imagining how nice it would be if Ben could—

“Be right back,” Klaus says, scrambling to his feet.

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t move.”

“Klaus!”

But Klaus is already rushing inside. He grabs a ballpoint pen and notepad off the desk in Dad’s office and sprints back to the courtyard.

Despite Klaus’s explicit instructions, Ben is standing now. At least his shadow hasn’t disappeared. Before Ben can ask, Klaus thrusts pen and paper at him. “Try this.”

Ben looks down at the office supplies. “Are you sure?”

Klaus performs a quick self-assessment. He’s about eighty percent certain his grip on Ben is strong enough not to slip in the next few seconds. “Yeah.”

With excruciating hesitancy, Ben reaches out. His fingertips brush Klaus’s palm as he takes the pen, and a pleasant tingle tumbles down Klaus’s spine. Ben sucks in a sharp breath. He snatches the notepad more quickly, almost greedily, and weighs the contents of his hands. “Wow,” he says, half-laughing.

Klaus watches in fascinated anticipation as, with trembling fingers, Ben clicks the pen open. He flips the notepad to a new page. His handwriting is wobbly, but the Umbrella Academy signed so many autographs back in the day, Klaus would recognize the unintelligible scribble of Ben’s signature anywhere.

Ben hands the notepad back to Klaus. When Klaus pulls the notepad out of Ben’s grip, Ben’s signature is still there, black ink plain as day on the page. Unmistakably, emphatically real.

Pardon Klaus while he catches his breath.

Ben doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to break the almost reverent silence that has settled between them.

“Don’t tell Vanya,” Klaus says at long last, “but I think I’m going to like your Academy-inspired bestsellers a lot better than her— _oof_.”

Klaus is nearly knocked on his ass by the impact of Ben’s hug.

Klaus has gotten slightly better at hugs since Vanya sprung one on him in the basement, so there isn’t quite as much lag time between Klaus registering the situation and wrapping his arms around Ben. Also, Klaus’s brain isn’t sounding the alarm like someone’s hit the panic button. All Klaus can think is, _Um, why the fuck didn’t we do this first?_

Klaus is abuzz, happiness burning bright and white-hot through his body like an electric current. He curls his fingers into the back of Ben’s jacket and tucks his face into Ben’s shoulder. Klaus would worry that he’s squeezing too tight, except there’s a real chance that Ben’s grip on him is going to leave bruises, so fair’s fair.

“This is nice,” Klaus says, the words of this wild understatement muffled against Ben’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Ben says, voice thick.

“I missed you.”

The words, not entirely intended, sound stupid to Klaus’s own ears. But Ben, forever tuned to Klaus’s exact wavelength, says, “Me too.”

 

Manifesting Ben only gets easier.

Ben is there to congratulate Allison, in person, when she speaks her first words with recovered vocal cords. He claps along with the rest of them when Vanya shows off her newly honed telekinesis by performing a hands-free, choppy but recognizable rendition of “Over the Rainbow” on the violin. He picks Luther’s brain about solo missions to inspire new Umbrella Academy comics. He picks up a piece of chalk to hash out some incomprehensible (meta)physics with Five on his bedroom wall.

With all the progress they’ve made in just a few short months, Klaus can’t help wondering how different things might have been, if Dad had arranged his training in the light of day, with tea and living human company within easy reach.

Klaus tries not to dwell on this, though. What he has now is more than he would have dared fantasize about, during that valley of time between Ben’s death and Dad’s. Ben remains the only ghost that Klaus exerts any real control over. But, to paraphrase recovery circles, Klaus is taking it one ghost at a time.

Ben, forever riding the cut-yourself-some-slack train, is mostly in support of this philosophy. With one exception.

“I can’t help but notice,” Ben says, excavating fistfuls of wet sand to construct the west wing of their sandcastle, “that you haven’t tried to Conjure Dave since getting sober.”

Beach trips have become a regular thing, as spring slides into summer. Ben enjoys them more now that he can feel the sun on his neck and the slice of cold water across his shins. He still likes to boss Klaus around when they’re building sandcastles. Diego too, when they convince him to join in.

(Now that the weather is warmer, Diego has also conceded to wearing shorts and t-shirts to the beach, rather than his combat gear. Klaus says this is a bigger miracle than Ben constructing a sandcastle with his own hands. Diego says Klaus can fuck right off.)

“Was there a question in there somewhere?” Klaus says, studiously avoiding Ben’s eyes.

“Are you going to tell me why?” Ben says.

Klaus assumed that he would eventually, because he tells Ben everything, even when he doesn’t particularly want to. He just assumed he’d have more time.

The thing is. Between heading off the apocalypse, struggling to find some semblance of stability in his newfound sobriety, restarting training, and warding off relapse temptation with every little-old-lady hobby under the sun, Klaus has found plenty of ways to avoid wallowing about Dave since returning to the present.

On the whole, this has worked pretty well. Mental avoidance is Klaus’s middle name, after all. Finally, Klaus feels like the eviscerating pain of losing Dave has begun to scab and scar over.

But if Klaus Conjures Dave, he won’t be summoning Dave’s spirit for keeps. Dave isn’t like Ben; he didn’t choose to come back. And what if, in Conjuring Dave for one final goodbye, Klaus tears his barely-recovered wound right back open again?

“Also,” Klaus tacks on to the end of his rambling explanation, “what if I’m not, like, how he remembers?” Klaus slaps a fistful of sand onto the side of the sandcastle. “Charm is a lot easier to come by when you’re high, and I’m—”

 _Sober-you has a self-loathing streak a mile wide_.

Yeah, no shit. How could Klaus not, when his sober-brain can constantly see all his flaws and fears in high-definition?

“—it’s different now,” Klaus finishes lamely under Ben’s critical eye.

“Klaus,” Ben says delicately. “If you think you’re not every bit as much of a disaster off the wagon as you are on it, then I’ve spent the last thirteen years wasting my breath. You know what I mean,” he adds, when Klaus opens his mouth. “I’ve never met Dave. But I’m guessing he loved you more because you’re the kind of person who trips over himself to make people happy, than because you can sing pitch-perfect ABBA songs when you’re drunk.”

“He thinks I wrote “Take a Chance on Me,”” Klaus says mournfully.

“Of course he does.”

Ben reaches across the sandcastle to pat Klaus on the shoulder. Klaus is never going to get over how he can just _do that_ now.

“As for the rest of it,” Ben says, “I don’t know if it would hurt or help for you to see Dave one last time. But whatever you decide, you don’t have to do it alone.”

 

Klaus hardly does anything alone anymore. He eats breakfast with Vanya before training. He joins Five for coffee-slash-tea breaks in the middle of the night when neither of them can sleep. He has a standing Saturday afternoon mani-pedi date with Allison.

Klaus isn’t even alone after nightmares anymore. Now when he wakes up, instead of slotting himself between the bed and the nightstand, or the bathtub and toilet, Klaus gets to curl up on the couch and watch movies with whoever happens to be around: always Ben, sometimes Five, and, when he’s not busy kicking ass and taking names, Diego.

Tonight, Klaus, Ben, and Diego are watching _Ghostbusters_ (2016 reboot, because hello, Chris Hemsworth). They’re only about halfway through, but Klaus is already drifting toward sleep on Diego’s shoulder.

Kate McKinnon is saying something that sounds much, much farther away than the TV screen across the room. Klaus’s blanket is incredibly warm. The anxious, pop-rocks fizzle that’s been crackling inside Klaus’s head since he screamed himself awake has finally begun to dampen.

“He falls asleep way faster now than he used to,” Ben says from somewhere above. A hand tucks Klaus’s blanket back up over his shoulder.

Klaus should make an effort to stay awake so Ben and Diego can keep talking, but the undertow of sleep is strong, and has Klaus mentioned how comfortable he is?

“Thanks for being there,” Diego says, so quiet that Klaus almost misses it. “When we weren’t.”

“You were there,” Ben says, “when it counted. In ways I couldn’t be.”

Diego makes a skeptical noise.

“There’s no one else whose shitty air mattress I’d rather crash on,” Klaus mumbles.

“I thought you were sleeping,” Diego says—not an accusation, but not _not_ an accusation, either.

“Almost,” Klaus says. “If someone’s shoulder were comfier.” Klaus rubs his cheek judgmentally against the rough material of Diego’s uniform.

“I don’t have any other clean clothes here.”

“You would if you just moved back in already,” Klaus says.

Diego gives a stiff shrug under Klaus’s cheek. “Maybe.”

“You will,” Ben says with confidence.

“Hard to go back to takeout after Mom’s cooking,” Diego says.

“Sure, we’ll pretend that’s why,” Klaus says, giving Diego a generous pat on the chest.

Silence, except for the action-sequence sounds of some ghostbusting kerfuffle on screen.

“Kind of crazy, isn’t it,” Diego says. “The whole Academy, back together again.”

“We’re not really the Academy anymore,” Klaus says. At least, he hopes they aren’t. “Dunno if you’ve noticed, but you’re the only one still subjecting yourself to spandex.”

“I meant,” Diego says, on the edge of irritation, “as a family.”

“Oh.” A swoop of happiness swings through Klaus’s stomach. “Yeah. Crazy.”

It’s a testament to their truly spectacular levels of family dysfunction that the almost-apocalypse was the hard reboot it took to save them.

“Think it’ll turn out any better than last time?” Diego says—voice wry, but in a strained sort of way that tells Klaus he’s legitimately asking.

“I don’t see how it could possibly turn out worse,” Ben says, not unreasonably.

“Nowhere to go but up,” Klaus agrees, with rare, unadulterated optimism. If there’s one thing serial addiction has taught Klaus, it’s how to begin again after things go to shit.

Except, unlike all of Klaus’s other fresh starts, this one feels less like moving on and more like settling down.

Ironic, that Klaus should spend so much of his life chasing a sense of safety, only to find it back here—warm in the security of being surrounded by people with no intention of leaving, and the promise of the mortifying, terrifying, life-saving ordeal of being known.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all for now, friends! Thanks again to everyone who left comments on the last chapter. It's been so much fun reveling in all the TUA feels with you guys <3 
> 
> Thanks again to the most wonderful sevenimpossiblethings for letting me drag her into a new fandom to beta.
> 
> Tumblr: [AGreatPerhaps12](https://agreatperhaps12.tumblr.com)


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